As I’ve already said in a few blog entries, I got fed up with the low quality of many modern whodunnits, so I went back to the golden age. I am half way through Ngiao Marsh’s œuvre, and am enjoying it immensely.
Ok, that’s slightly unfair on contemporary novels. Going back in time by most of a century means reading the material that has survived a century of filtering. The mediocre novels weren’t published, the ordinary have been forgotten, & the great have survived. I can be confident that selecting an elderly novel that’s still easily available means I am selecting quality.
Modern novels do not have the benefit of that filter of a century. Of course, there are the occasional great modern whodunnits, but the dross is also available, it has not been filtered out by time. The way to find a good modern novel is to read the reviews, but I’m just too lazy. Having said that, once I’ve discovered an excellent modern novel, I can follow that author, as I do with Ian Rankin, and I would do with China Miéville, were he to write any more.
I’m sure there has been a lot written about Marsh, but I’m going to write some more.
In general, she structures her novels by starting with the events that lead up to the crime, then its discovery, then the arrival of the detectives, the process of detection, and they all end with the discovery of the identity of the murderer. This means her novels have two halves, a new story involving new characters (usually) and a crime, then the dominant characters switch to the familiar detectives. The detectives do grow a little across the novels, but at nothing like the pace of the other characters, who rarely cross volumes.
The mysteries are rather fun, and, most of the time, I am completely fooled by the story as told. This doesn’t matter to me: what I enjoy in the novels is not sussing out the killer, but the characters introduced, their interaction, their growth, their dreams, their humanity, how they deal with the nasty world, how they deal with the stress of murder in their midst, of the process of detection. The detectives seem rather dull in comparison, probably because their characters have already been introduced and explored in the earlier novels.
I do tend to react differently to different groups of people before the crime occurs. Some, I absolutely adore, and regret the ending of the book—indeed, one or two groups are so lovely that I regret they don’t exist in real life. Others, I dislike, and that makes it less likely for me to read the book at speed. In some ways, this reflects the quality of Marsh’s writing, that she so carefully captures the behaviour of people that I react to her books the way I react to such people in real life. For example, one novel, set in New Zealand—and this is a mild spoiler—features a pretty horrible chap who gets his just desserts, IMHO: he is the victim. I did not like the character at all, nor did I enjoy the performance of the character by the narrator, not because the narrator was bad, but because he got the character spot on. I really do not like presumptive pushy salesmen, Marsh wrote and killed one, and the narrator pretended to be high on arrogance on his behalf. Good reading, good performance, and I’m a wimp!
I regret that she doesn’t explore events post–reveal. How do the other characters react at the dreadful discovery, immediately or in the longer term? Now, to be fair, some of her later novels revisit characters, so the reader does see some of the consequences, but after the distance of years, not lived immediately after the moment of the reveal. I would like to have seen a postscript, showing some of the consequences.
Marsh is of her time, and, as the novels are written, her time progresses. Her early novels are very toff orientated, but, as she gets into the 1950s (I’ve still to read her later novels), that class stuff is slowly reduced. In the one 1950s novel I’ve read with toffs, it turns out the toff is an astute businessman, hence he can still afford to be thoroughly toff–ish. She also adores the theatre, which is where I find some of her most alive character portraits.
I am very much enjoying reading these novels, and will read them all.