Book Review: Clutch of Constables
Aug. 2nd, 2016 08:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI just finished Ngaio Marsh’s Clutch of Constables! I am on a Ngaio Marsh kick again, and this is one of the good ones. (I have found ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
evelyn_b’s Ngaio Marsh tag a helpful pre-screening method in this regard.)
This book has not only murder but ART FORGERY, otherwise known as my favorite crime ever, and I read at least three of Iain Pears Jonathan Argyll series of art history mysteries in the plangent hope that they would eventually get better because I loved the idea of mysteries about ART FORGERY so much, but in fact they remained terrible forever. Why are they even called the Jonathan Argyll mysteries? His partner Flavia is the one who is an actual cop.
But I digress. Actually Clutch of Constables deals very little with the technical aspects of art forgery, which is quite all right, as in place of technical details we get a great deal of Agatha Troy, Inspector Alleyn’s wife who is an artist of some renown herself. After a stressful art show, Troy impulsively signs up for a five day cruise on a riverboat through the countryside where Constable painted, and of course finds her vacation interrupted by murder.
The cruise is beautifully described - I think this is the best landscape description in a Marsh set outside of New Zealand - so much so that it made me want to go to England and take a boat cruise myself, to drift aimlessly along the meanders and look out on the open countryside.
The riverboat tour also serves to keep the cast small, so Marsh has time to really open out their idiosyncrasies. Oone of the things I really enjoy about mysteries is that you seem to get a wider variety of characters than in other types of books; the characters have to be credible as possible murder victims and murder suspects, so it’s actually an asset if some of them are unlikable.
I particularly enjoyed poor Hazel Rickerby-Carrick, who performs the interesting trick of being unlikable and yet sympathetic in her extraordinary awkwardness. She is forever scribbling away in her diary (“My self-propelling confessional, I call it,” she tells Troy), writing things like “Would they like me? Would they find me simpatica or is it simpatico? Alas, there I go again. Incorrigible, hopeless old Me!”
She is, as the emphasis on the pronouns suggests, hopelessly self-conscious, and forever crashing about like a bull in a china shop. “Her sledgehammer tact crashes over Dr. N[atouche] like a shower of brickbats, so anxious is she to be unracial,” Troy writes to Alleyn. Something of an awkward bunny herself, Troy is filled simultaneously with helpless sympathy and the burning desire to fling herself overboard rather than spend time in Miss Rickerby-Carrick’s company.
(I was about worried about Dr. Natouche, as there is always the chance that Marsh might go somewhere surprisingly racist when she has a major character of color in her books. But actually she was fairly restrained in this book; no tangents about the Eternal Nature of the African of the kind that marred Black As He’s Painted.)
Miss Rickerby-Carrick is so determined to be good and kind and put people at ease, and so utterly incapable of doing so. She can’t manage a pleasant conversation with a bog-standard white British person; of course she flounders completely when the difficulty setting is upped a notch, either by Dr. Natouche’s race or Troy’s artistic celebrity. It’s a rather brilliant tragic portrait in its way.
evelyn_b’s Ngaio Marsh tag a helpful pre-screening method in this regard.) This book has not only murder but ART FORGERY, otherwise known as my favorite crime ever, and I read at least three of Iain Pears Jonathan Argyll series of art history mysteries in the plangent hope that they would eventually get better because I loved the idea of mysteries about ART FORGERY so much, but in fact they remained terrible forever. Why are they even called the Jonathan Argyll mysteries? His partner Flavia is the one who is an actual cop.
But I digress. Actually Clutch of Constables deals very little with the technical aspects of art forgery, which is quite all right, as in place of technical details we get a great deal of Agatha Troy, Inspector Alleyn’s wife who is an artist of some renown herself. After a stressful art show, Troy impulsively signs up for a five day cruise on a riverboat through the countryside where Constable painted, and of course finds her vacation interrupted by murder.
The cruise is beautifully described - I think this is the best landscape description in a Marsh set outside of New Zealand - so much so that it made me want to go to England and take a boat cruise myself, to drift aimlessly along the meanders and look out on the open countryside.
The riverboat tour also serves to keep the cast small, so Marsh has time to really open out their idiosyncrasies. Oone of the things I really enjoy about mysteries is that you seem to get a wider variety of characters than in other types of books; the characters have to be credible as possible murder victims and murder suspects, so it’s actually an asset if some of them are unlikable.
I particularly enjoyed poor Hazel Rickerby-Carrick, who performs the interesting trick of being unlikable and yet sympathetic in her extraordinary awkwardness. She is forever scribbling away in her diary (“My self-propelling confessional, I call it,” she tells Troy), writing things like “Would they like me? Would they find me simpatica or is it simpatico? Alas, there I go again. Incorrigible, hopeless old Me!”
She is, as the emphasis on the pronouns suggests, hopelessly self-conscious, and forever crashing about like a bull in a china shop. “Her sledgehammer tact crashes over Dr. N[atouche] like a shower of brickbats, so anxious is she to be unracial,” Troy writes to Alleyn. Something of an awkward bunny herself, Troy is filled simultaneously with helpless sympathy and the burning desire to fling herself overboard rather than spend time in Miss Rickerby-Carrick’s company.
(I was about worried about Dr. Natouche, as there is always the chance that Marsh might go somewhere surprisingly racist when she has a major character of color in her books. But actually she was fairly restrained in this book; no tangents about the Eternal Nature of the African of the kind that marred Black As He’s Painted.)
Miss Rickerby-Carrick is so determined to be good and kind and put people at ease, and so utterly incapable of doing so. She can’t manage a pleasant conversation with a bog-standard white British person; of course she flounders completely when the difficulty setting is upped a notch, either by Dr. Natouche’s race or Troy’s artistic celebrity. It’s a rather brilliant tragic portrait in its way.
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no subject
Date: 2016-08-02 05:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-08-03 12:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-08-03 08:42 am (UTC)It's been a while since I read it, but, yes, indeed, it's a painfully good portrait.
I really like this one, but not as much as some others - but I do think that I'm unfairly prejudiced simply because I have it in a hbk book club edition that I don't like as much as my paperbooks - the print isn't as easy to read and it doesn't have the same feel. (All my Alleyns are second-hand editions. I used to have some 1970s/80s UK ones and the jackets were so lurid I used to have to make paper covers so that my more easily upset friend could read them. She was fine with the murders in the book, but blood on the cover was another matter. They used to be easy enough to find second hand here that I gave those away in the deluded belief that I'd later pick up nicer copies and replacing my lost Marshes is now a much harder task.)
no subject
Date: 2016-08-03 12:58 pm (UTC)Marsh books have become soooo hard to find secondhand. Hopefully someone will reprint them at some point so they will start making the bookstore rounds again.
no subject
Date: 2016-08-04 07:29 am (UTC)I'm not sure Hazel would ever understand role-playing.
no subject
Date: 2016-08-03 09:39 pm (UTC)There is obviously a desperate need for some nice new Marsh reprints (which I can only hope will have fewer typos than the Sayers reprints).
no subject
Date: 2016-08-04 07:43 am (UTC)She is still in print in the UK, actually. (See ,a href=https://www.amazon.co.uk/Grave-Mistake-Inspector-Roderick-Alleyn/dp/1631940546/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1470295623&sr=1-6&keywords=ngaio+marsh>here, and there are omnibus versions too, although those aren't so good.) I think so far my favourite editions are these or these maybe. these were okay too.
(I've just been Googling because I wonder if my UK lurid 1970s editions were the same ones as you've seen, but the internet doesn't believe in them. They don't exist and I don't have any of them any more to prove them did! They weren't as bad as some of the glorious 60s lurid ones I'm seeing here, but they were very enthusiastic about blood being everywhere.
No, no, found some, although I don't think I had any of these, except Died in the Wool:
http://img0058.psstatic.com/108406910_amazoncom-the-nursing-home-murder-ngaio-marsh-books.jpg
http://www.crimefictionlover.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Died-In-The-Wool.jpg
https://hypnoticmysteries.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/10082401564_faf051a920.jpg?w=474&h=371
(I'm very amused that Fontana evidently did a whole death shoot and used two different shots for slightly different editions of Death at the Bar: https://hypnoticmysteries.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/9780006131588-uk-300.jpg?w=215&h=355
no subject
Date: 2016-08-03 09:35 pm (UTC)Clutch of Constables was great, and I wouldn't mind a riverboat cruise myself, especially minus the death and criminal investigation.
I feel like Dr. Natouche is more typical of Marsh than the weird politics-as-DNA racial subtheories of Black as He's Painted, but there aren't that many examples to go on (unlike That One Gay Guy, who is legion).
To be fair to Jonathan Argyll (whom I've only heard about for the first time today), Miss Marple isn't an actual cop either, but she still gets mysteries named after her due to being the best.
no subject
Date: 2016-08-04 12:43 am (UTC)IIRC DNA-as-destiny shows up not only with regard to race but also as inheritable criminal insanity in The Nursing Home Murder. One of Marsh's later books actually goes out of its way to argue against that, though, rather the way that Alleyn argues against Irrefutable Face Science in Clutch of Constables. (I wonder if Marsh had read one too many Josephine Tey books when she was writing that section.)
But does Miss Marple have a cop partner who does at least 50% of the actual investigating? I feel like that's a different situation.