Spinsters In Jeopardy
A review of Spinsters in Jeopardy by Ngaio Marsh – 230307
I still cannot make my mind up about Ngaio Marsh. She wrote some superb murder mysteries and was particularly inventive in the way that her victims met her end, but there are too many mediocre books in her canon. Spinsters in Jeopardy, which also goes by the title of The Bride of Death, originally published in 1953, falls fairly and squarely into the latter category.
It is entertaining enough, but it relies far too much on coincidence for my taste. The Alleyns are travelling en famille, including their precocious six-year-old son, Ricky, whose proficiency in French belies his tender years, for a holiday in France, partly as cover for series detective Roderick’s undercover mission in conjunction with the French police to penetrate a fiendish drug gang led by Mr Oberon who also dabble in spiritual rituals and outlandish sexual practices. They are travelling to see one of Agatha Troy’s distant relatives by the name of Garbel, whom they have never met and whom they mistakenly believe to be a man.
Garbel just happens to be working at the drug factory and is an intimate within Oberon’s circle. On the train journey, both Roderick and Agatha just happen to look out of the train window as it is about to enter a tunnel and see what they believe to be a man about to stab a woman in an adjacent chateau, Chevre d’Argent. On board the train is a spinster, Miss Truebody, who suffers a severe ruptured appendix and needs urgent medical attention. Of course, all the doctors in the vicinity are away at a conference and the only medic in the area is Dr Baradi, an associate of Oberon’s and staying at Chevre d’Argent. Alleyn nobly offers to accompany her, giving him a perfect excuse to penetrate the den of iniquity and even helps by being Baradi’s anaesthetist.
Alleyn’s cover is almost blown because amongst those in Oberon’s circle are the artist Carbury Glande who knows Agatha but, unbelievably, does not know she is married to one of Britain’s foremost policeman and a drug-addled, alcoholic actress who met Alleyn on a transatlantic voyage but surprisingly agrees to keep quiet about his identity. Even Ricky plays his part, nobly being kidnapped, waving from a balcony just at the moment his parents were gazing in that direction, and providing his father and his French counterpart with an excuse to raid the drug factory. And so it goes on.
Oberon and his cronies engage in almost every conceivable form of nefarious activities from murder to childnapping, from drug production, pushing and taking to deviant sexual practices and fraud. Although coy in her narrative, Marsh is more explicit in her descriptions of the sort of sexual hanky panky the cult gets up to, more so than some of her contemporaries.
Frankly, there is little dramatic tension in the plot and no mystery as we know who the culprits are and we are pretty certain that what the Alleyns saw was a murder. Thematically, it is a reworking of Death in Ecstasy which also features a sinister cult but does not reach its heights. The book ambles along and is enthralling enough but cannot rise above the welter of coincidences that make the plot so unbelievable. Perhaps Marsh was having a creative holiday herself when she wrote this.
