About this item
Commemorating 75 years since the Empress of Crime's first book, the ninth volume in a set of omnibus editions presenting the complete run of 32 Inspector Alleyn mysteries. CLUTCH OF CONSTABLES According to Chief Superintendent Roderick Alleyn, 'the Jampot' is an international crook who regards murder as 'tiresome and regrettable necessities'. But Alleyn's wife Troy has shared close quarters with the Jampot on a pleasure cruise along the peaceful rivers of 'Constable country' and knows something is badly wrong even before the two murders on board...WHEN IN ROME When their guide disappears mysteriously in the depths of a Roman Basilica, the members of Sebastian Mailer's tour group seem strangely unperturbed. But when a body is discovered in an Etruscan sarcophagus, Superintendent Alleyn, in Rome on the trail of an international drug racket, is very much concerned...TIED UP IN TINSEL When a much disliked visiting servant disappears without trace after playing Santa Claus, foul play is at once suspected - only suspicion falls not on the staff but on the unimpeachably respectable guests. When Superintendent Roderick Alleyn returns unexpectedly from a trip overseas, it is to find his beloved wife in the thick of an intriguing mystery...
About the Author
Dame Ngaio Marsh, born Edith Ngaio Marsh, was a New Zealand crime writer and theatre director. There is some uncertainty over her birth date as her father neglected to register her birth until 1900, but she was born in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand. Of all the "Great Ladies" of the English mystery's golden age, including Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh alone survived to publish in the 1980s. Over a fifty-year span, from 1932 to 1982, Marsh wrote thirty-two classic English detective novels, which gained international acclaim. She did not always see herself as a writer, but first planned a career as a painter. Marsh's first novel, A MAN LAY DEAD (1934) , which she wrote in London in 1931-32, introduced the detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn: a combination of Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey and a realistically depicted police official at work. Throughout the 1930s Marsh painted occasionally, wrote plays for local repertory societies in New Zealand, and published detective novels. In 1937 Marsh went to England for a period. Before going back to her home country, she spent six months travelling about Europe. All her novels feature British CID detective Roderick Alleyn. Several novels feature Marsh's other loves, the theatre and painting. A number are set around theatrical productions (Enter a Murderer, Vintage Murder, Overture to Death, Opening Night, Death at the Dolphin, and Light Thickens) , and two others are about actors off stage (Final Curtain and False Scent) . Her short story "'I Can Find My Way Out" is also set around a theatrical production and is the earlier "Jupiter case" referred to in Opening Night. Alleyn marries a painter, Agatha Troy, whom he meets during an investigation (Artists in Crime) , and who features in several later novels.
