If you’ve ever known any mean, unattractive older ladies, who seem angry and upset whenever other people are happy and fulfilled, and yet who prefer to express their anger by using indirect comments often disguised as compliments or helpful hints, you will have a riot reading Overture to Murder. Eleanor Prentice and Idris Campanula are both this type of woman, and their so-called friendship disguises a fierce, underground rivalry. Marsh’s careful writing style, with a strong focus on the inner thoughts, emotions, and motivations of the characters, is perfect here, in describing these two difficult characters, as well as everyone else in the story. In addition to being very revealing and evocative, Marsh’s writing is humorous, and so even though many of the people in the book are quite unpleasant, I didn’t find any of the scenes boring. This entry in the series is set in a small village, which of course, because this is a Golden Age mystery, seems conventional on the surface but secretly contains all sorts of undercurrents and scandalous goings-on. The plot revolves around an amateur play, which is being put on in order to raise funds to buy a new piano for the Young People’s Society. The focus on the first part of the book is on the village itself, and the various people who are taking part in the play: the rector and his daughter, the squire and his son, the village doctor, a vaguely outrageous woman named Mrs. Ross, and of course, the two vicious spinsters. It is quite a while before Chief Inspector Alleyn shows up, from London – he’s called in when a serious crime occurs, and the local police force is too busy with another investigation to be able to handle both.Alleyn is accompanied by his familiar friends Fox and Nigel Bathgate, who always add a lot to these books.Although I guessed pieces of the solution to the mystery, and began to feel a bit impatient at the beginning, as the book went on and Alleyn hadn’t shown up yet, I found this to be a satisfying and entertaining read. Marsh didn’t hold back when she wrote, and I am grateful.
This is the eighth of Marsh’s Inspector Alleyn mysteries, and it has always been one of my favorites. “Murder at the Parish Hall” or “Prelude to Death” it might have been called; either one would have been appropriate. Set in the last days before the Second World War in a rural Dorset village, I love the name of the gentry house: Pen Cuckoo. [Alleyn would return to the same neighborhood in a later novel, Death and the Dancing Footman.] It has many of Marsh’s stock characters: the doctor, a lovely young woman who features as the ingenue both in terms of the role she plays in the plot and the fact that she fancies herself an actress, her besotted lover whose family doesn’t think she’s good enough for him, a temptress in her thirties who is no better than she ought to be, the slightly ridiculous landed gentry, and country bumpkins galore. But Marsh pokes fun at gentry and country alike; like Jane Austen, no one escapes her keen observation. [Though I find her upper class characters awfully fastidious about nuances of behavior: what’s “done” and what’s not often seems ridiculous and over-scrupulous to me. But perhaps that’s the way they really behaved.]The reason this book is one of my favorites is the two spinster characters: Eleanor Prentice and Idris Campanula. [And again, what a name!] This book was written in the late 1930s, but I swear I’ve met women like this today. Marsh captured the neurotic obsessiveness of two unmarried “church hens” with such vivid detail. Today we would them “frenemies,” but that is far too shallow and superficial a term that misses the depths of such a relationship. March doesn’t miss a thing in her depiction of these two over-wrought women who were at once rivals and allies.
What do You think about Overture To Death (2001)?
Originally published on my blog here in May 1998.This novel could be cited as among the most typical crime fiction novels of all time. The murder takes place in a small village at an amateur theatrical production; everybody in the cast of the play can be suspected; the characters consist of the squire and his son, the rector and his daughter (involved in a romance with the squire's son which is opposed by their fathers), two elderly spinsters in jealous rivalry for the affections of the rector, the village doctor and his mistress.The murder itself is contrived through an ingenious booby-trap, originally set up by a small boy to fire a water pistol through the cloth front of a piano onto the player when the "soft pedal" is pressed; the murderer replaced the water pistol with a gun. As the pianist was changed at the last minute, the question to be answered by Alleyn is whether the attack was meant for the original or replacement pianist.Overture to Death is certainly very competently done, but it feels in the end as though something is lacking: the elements are so much part of the genre that it cannot stand out as particularly original (even considering that it was written over fifty years ago). But these criticisms don't stop the book being an enjoyable read; after all, originality is not altogether the prime concern for genre addicts.
—Simon Mcleish
Pom! Pom! Pom! Three notes sounded from the piano. As the third one died away a shot rang out and a murder was committed in a sleepy English village where the inhabitants enjoyed their gossip and illicit love affairs.The local bobby was deemed incapable of solving the crime without the help of Chief Inspector Alleyn of Scotland Yard. He duly arrives with his trusty assistants and Nigel Bathgate, his faithful Watson.He interviews all the suspects and, in turn, it appears as though each of them could just have committed the crime. But who actually did do it? Alleyn is probably the only one who knows and he keeps it to himself, naturally, until the final few pages when he reveals the culprit in an eminently readable novel in which he also maintains a little love interest of his own!
—Gerry
One of my favourite things about Marsh's book is that she spends quite a bit of time on the set up for the mystery-if you like action from the very beginning this book is not for you. I love the fact that we see so much scene development and character development in a mystery. For me, the scene and the atmosphere are as important as the mystery itself. DO NOT read the chapter titles, unless you like spoilers. If I had to pick my two favourite detectives ever, I would pick Poirot and Alleyn. Alleyn is as enjoyable for me to read as Poirot. Another classic 1930's mystery, and really, what's not to love about a booby-trapped piano as the murder weapon?
—Doina
