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Read Night At The Vulcan (1998)

Night at the Vulcan (1998)

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4.02 of 5 Votes: 2
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ISBN
0312966687 (ISBN13: 9780312966683)
Language
English
Publisher
st. martin's paperbacks

Night At The Vulcan (1998) - Plot & Excerpts

Dame Ngaio Marsh has pulled it off big-time in this one. This mystery which moves at breakneck pace takes place over a period of four days, during the rehearsals and opening night of the play "Thus to Revisit". The author draws her knowledge of the stage enormously, and we are presented with the spectacle of the stirring human drama, taking place backstage in the dressing rooms.Martyn Tarne is a young girl, not quite out of teenage, on the lookout to make it on the London stage. She hopes to use her uncanny physical resemblance to Adam Poole, the leading man and the producer of the play in question, as there is a part which has exactly the same requirements. Unfortunately, however, she misses out on the casting but manages to land a job as the dresser to the leading lady, Helena Hamilton.Once in, Martyn finds she has entered into a seething cauldron of human emotions. Poole is having an affair with Helena, who is married to Clark Bennington, an actor in the twilight of his career. Bennington is an alcoholic, partly due to the reason that he is being cuckolded - and he makes a life hell for all others involved with the play. The team has another unbearable character in the person of Dr John Rutherford, author of the play; he is harsh with everybody, especially with Gay Gainsford, Bennington's niece, who is the actress playing the part Martyn was hoping to get. J.G.Darcey, a character actor who is sweet on Gay, Parry Percival, another actor and Jacques Dore (Jacko), "general dogsbody to Poole" completes the cast of characters in this dressing room drama.The setting is also not pleasant. Years before, an actor had been murdered at the Vulcan Theatre where the play is slated to open. It had been shutdown since then; recently Poole has purchased it, pooh-poohing the superstitious whispers. However, in the show business, superstition rarely goes away so easily.The trouble starts when Martyn is given the job of understudy to Gay: it is not long before Dr John notices the resemblance to Poole and wants her to be given the role. However, Bennington would have none of it, and she is secretly relieved. But Gay goes to pieces and throws hysterics just before the start, and Martyn is forced to make her first stage appearance in inauspicious circumstances.The play is a hit: however, just before the curtain call, Bennington commits suicide by inhaling gas exactly like the previous murder. The only problem is, Chief Inspector Alleyn of Scotland Yard knows it's murder...***This novel about a play is actually structured like a classic play: the setting is confined, the time frame compressed and the characters, limited. The action rises from the beginning up to the point of the murder, which is the first climax - then there is the resolution, ending with the second climax of the unmasking of the murderer. It is a very fast read.Also, Dame Ngaio has succeeded in that particular sleight of hand where the readers are misdirected at the crucial moment from the actual clues. It is not as breathtaking as Agatha Christie does (IMO, at least) but pretty impressive all the same. And when you review it after the cat is out of the bag, it all holds up well.

Book 16, and it's always been one of my favorites. Marsh returns to the same theatre from her second book, "Enter a Murderer," once the Jupiter, now the Vulcan, for yet another murder on the boards. She also brings back a character from two earlier books [Death of a Peer and Surfeit of Lampreys], one of the eccentric Lamprey family. Young Michael is now all grown up and on the police force!Once again, however, there are some vile remarks by certain characters about a man they assume to be gay. But Marsh makes it clear that these attitudes belong to her characters, not to her, in this wonderful quote about 65 percent of the way through the book.“Oh, shut up!’ Parry shouted and was awarded a complete and astonished silence. He rose and addressed himself to the players. ‘You’re all being so bloody frank and sensible about this suicide,’ he said. ‘You’re so anxious to show everybody how honest you are. The doctor’s so unconcerned he can even spare a moment to indulge in his favourite pastime of me-baiting. I know what the doctor thinks of me and it doesn’t say much for his talents as a diagnostician. But if it’s Queer to feel desperately sorry for a man who was miserable enough to choke himself to death at a gas-jet, if it’s Queer to be physically and mentally sick at the thought of it then, by God, I’d rather be Queer than normal. Now!”

What do You think about Night At The Vulcan (1998)?

Night at the Vulcan, by Ngaio Marsh, b-plus, Narrated by James Saxon, Produced by Audio Partners Publishing, downloaded from audible.com.At the venerable Vulcan Theater, tensions are runninghigh on opening night. There are the usual problems, certainly: muffed lines, a late curtain, egos butting heads. But the show must go on! And it does,then the entire production is upstaged when the leading man is found backstage, dead. Was it suicide or murder, Scotland Yard's inspector RoderickAlleyn takes center stage in a puzzle that might be a macabre encore to a long-ago murder in the same backstage room. James Saxon is particularly wonderful as a reader for this book, which is about the theater and the inflamed egoes of the actors. He plays their exaggerated personas extremely well.
—Kathleen Hagen

Originally published on my blog here in October 1998.Opening Night, something of a return to form for Ngaio Marsh after a series of somewhat disappointing stories, is closely related to the short story I Can Find My Way Out, with which it shares a setting. Following the murder at the Dolphin Theatre which is the subject of the earlier story, it has lain empty for the best part of fifteen years. In the superstitious business of acting, nobody wanted to reopen such an unlucky theatre.Eventually, it is acquired by well-known actor Adam Poole, to put on a new play by the distinguished author John James Rutherford. He is joined in this by Helena Hamilton, famous as the leading lady to many of Adam Poole's performances though rather older, and her husband, the once great now alcoholic actor Clark Bennington, resentful of the old love affair between Adam and Helena.The play calls for an actress who resembles Adam, and Bennington insists that his neice Gay Gainsford is cast. This suits no one other than Bennington, for she is not interested in the type of symbolical drama Rutherford writes, is helplessly out of her depth, unhappy about having to change her appearance to more closely resembly Adam (whom she is not very like and finds it difficult to give the impression of resembling by apparently unconsciously copying his mannerisms on stage). She was far happier playing in regional rep, doing parts she could understand and which suited her. She becomes even more uneasy after the appearance on the scene of Martyn Tarne.Martyn Tarne, a young actress from New Zealand seeking work in London, is really the main character in the novel, which is told from her point of view (though in the third person). She is distantly related to Adam, but doesn't wish to presume on their kinship, so that his theatre is the last that she goes to looking for work. She has missed the auditions, but overhears a conversation by chance and volunteers to replace Helena's usual dresser, who is ill.That in itself would not be a problem, but she rather unfortunately possesses a startling resemblance to Adam, sufficiently so to provoke rumours that she may be a result of a love affair of Adam's from a tour of New Zealand twenty years ago. Her appearance and her aptitude for the part earn her the role of Gay's understudy, and pressure mounts for her to play the part outright, particularly from Rutherford. This culminates when Gay refuses to go on for the first night, and Martyn has a great triumph.The theatrical fairy story is immediately overshadowed by the death in his dressing room of Bennington, in a marder got up to look like a suicide inspired by the earlier Dolphin murder.Perhaps a little on the soft-centred side to rank with Marsh's best novels, Opening Night is nevertheless an excellent example of the crime fiction genre; reading it is an enjoyable experience.
—Simon Mcleish

* * * 1/2Down-on-her-luck Martyn Tarne (yes, "Martyn" is a female name, which threw me off a bit until I figured it out) is applying for theatre work in England, having recently arrived from New Zealand. She's down to two shillings and a few-odd pence and is seriously considering sleeping in a homeless shelter for the night. However, luck is upon her when she arrives at the Vulcan Theatre: the dresser for the noted Helena Hamilton has been taken ill, so Martyn steps into the breach. But the theatre has a bit of a gloomy past: five years previously, someone was killed by the gas fire in the dressing room. The actors, being a superstitious lot, don't talk much about it. Imagine then how much it rattles them when one of their number appears to have committed suicide in much the same manner as the previous death. Or is it really suicide...?This is a slow-burn book with a slightly rushed ending. The slow burn is at least diverting: Marsh, being a playwright, knows all about actors' foibles and quirks and is adept at describing the atmosphere of a theatre in different stages of a production. Anyone who has worked in theatre will recognize themselves at some point in the story (for me, I definitely remembered the nervous thrill of opening night and how it all feels slightly unreal). Once the death occurs, Alleyn and the troops come in and simply talk their way to a solution, which seemed a bit anticlimactic. So if you're planning to read this I would say the characters are a bigger draw than the actual plot.
—rabbitprincess

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