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Australian Book Retailer of the Year 2021
Ngaio Marsh
No one could doubt that Mr. Percival Pyke Period was genuinely distraught to hear that his neighbor, Harry Cartell, had turned up dead in a ditch. But how is it…
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A classic Ngaio Marsh novel in which she more than lives up to her reputation as a crime writer of intelligence and style.
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Bruce Harding
Considered one of the Queens of Crime , Ngaio Marsh (1895-1982) was a gifted writer and a celebrated author of classic British detective fiction, as well as a successful theatre…
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B. J. Rahn
In 1934, Ngaio Marsh’s first novel, A Man Lay Dead , was published to critical acclaim. For the next fifty years, Marsh wrote more than 30 English detective novels, while…
Joanne Drayton
The Empress of Crime’s life was the ultimate detective story - revealed for the first time in this forthright and perceptive biography.
A classic Ngaio Marsh novel reissued in B-format.
Colour Scheme is set during World War II at a mud-baths resort in New Zealand run by Colonel Claire. His business is on the brink of being taken over by…
Ngaio Marsh wisely set this last novel in her mystery series in the world of theater. It was in this setting that she produced some of her best work, and…
It’s true, darts is nobody’s idea of a low-risk amusement, yet it is rarely lethal. Tell that to the famous barrister who was enjoying a pint at the Plume of…
A delicious, classic country-house mystery. Sir Henry Ancred, a celebrated Shakespearian actor, has arranged to have his portrait painted by Agatha Troy wife of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. She’s rather glad…
Lord Pastern fired his revolver. The figure in the spotlight fell and the coup-de-theatre had become murder. Could Inspector Alleyn believe Pastern had let hatred of his future son-in-law go…
First U.K. edition: London: Geoffrey Bles, 1937; First U.S. edition: New York: Sheridan House, 1940.
A body in the back of a taxi begins an elegantly constructed mystery, perhaps the finest of Marsh’s 1930s novels.
A classic crime tale sees the first notes played on the new parish hall piano bring about a gruesome death
World War II rages on, and Inspector Alleyn continues as the Special Branch’s eyes and ears in New Zealand. While his primary brief is spy-catching, he’s also happy to help…
Wealthy Sir Hubert Handesley’s original and lively weekend house-parties are deservedly famous. To amuse his guests, he has devised a new form of the fashionable Murder Game, in which a…
First U.K. edition: London: Geoffrey Bles, 1936; First U.S. edition: New York: Sheridan, 1941.
The village of South Mardian likes the old ways. This may be 1957, but South M. still features a blacksmith, a village idiot, and an elaborate fertility ritual performed at…
The impresario Peregrine Jay has fulfilled a long-cherished dream: Thanks to a very generous gift, he now owns the Dolphin Theatre, and has restored it to its former glory. To…
Inspector Alleyn’s old school chum, the Boomer, is now president of the new African nation of Ng'ombwana. On an official visit to London, the Boomer insists that Alleyn handle his…
Another thrilling Ngaio Marsh mystery involving a grizzly death and Roderick Alleyn taking to the seas to uncover the murderer.
Mary Bellamy is the sweetheart of the London stage, fluffy as only an elderly lady of 50(!) can be. Her fans and friends-and who didn’t adore, positively adore darling Mary?-are…
The elderly Emily Pride is perfectly pleased to have inherited an island, even if her starchy pragmatism is ever-so-faintly appalled by the Pixie Falls spring and its reported miraculous healing…
It’s 1968 and Inspector Alleyn is in Rome assisting the Italian police in the investigation of an international drug-smuggling operation. The book references both la dolce vita and student protests…
A Felony & Mayhem mystery –T.p. verso.
The usual opening night scandals behind the scenes at the Vulcan Theater–including the leading lady’s tumultuous love affair–are upstaged by a death, bring Scotland Yard’s Roderick Alleyn scurrying to the…
Despite two husbands being dead and a daughter marrying the wrong man, no one believed Sybil Foster was the type to commit suicide, especially Superintenent Roderick Alleyn. For the field…
A country house murder, artistic insight and the post-war reunion of Alleyn and Troy combine in Ngaio Marsh’s novel.
April Fool’s Day had been a roaring success for all, it seemed - except for poor Mr Cartell who had ended up dead in the ditch. Mr Percival Pyke Period’s…
Taking a spontaneous river cruise through the part of England made famous by the paintings of John Constable, Agatha Troy, Inspector Alleyn’s painter wife, encounters murder and international art theft…
It’s murder at a country-house party; a Christmas party, in fact, where all the guests are eccentric, and all the household staff are former criminals. Which of them caused the…
Astonishingly, this Inspector Alleyn mystery was written in 1977, and Inspector Alleyn has a 21 year old son who gets into trouble in the Channel Islands, necessitating the arrival of…
When murder upsets the creative tranquillity of an artists colony, Scotland Yard sends in its most famous investigator. And what begins as a routine case, turns out to be most…
Murder and mayhem strike when a small group of people are confined to an island in the middle of a New Zealand lake in one of Ngaio Marsh’s last –…
Of all the books in the Alleyn series, Scales of Justice is most powerfully reminiscent of Agatha Christie, with its setting in an almost unspeakably charming little English village, and…
One of Ngaio Marsh’s most popular novels, this time featuring one of her best creations - Lucy Lockett, the crime-solving cat.
Murder and mayhem strike when a small group of people are confined to an island in the middle of a New Zealand lake in one of Ngaio Marsh’s novels.
The complete series of Ngaio Marsh reissues concludes with the re-publication of this 20th anniversary edition of this, her final novel.
A young New Zealander’s first contact with the English gentry is the body of Lord Wutherford with a meat skewer through the eye…
Eight people, many of them enemies, gathered for a winter weekend by a host with a love for theatre. They would be the characters in a drama that he would…
It was a horrible death - Maurice Questing was lured into a pool of boiling mud and left there to die. Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn, far from home on a…
Ngaio Marsh returns to her New Zealand roots to transplant the country house murder mystery to an upland sheep station on South Island.
Pagan revelry and morris dancing in the middle of a very cold winter set the scene for one of Ngaio Marsh’s most fascinating murder mysteries.
The restoration of a bombed-out London theatre ends in violent death.
Ngaio Marsh’s bestselling and ingenious third novel remains one of the most popular pieces of crime fiction of all time.