Anyone who loves the classic detection novel is probably familiar with the so-called "Queens of Crime" -- Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Margery Allingham. During the second and third quarters of the twentieth century these writers (all British with the partial exception of New Zealander Marsh) played a significant role in creating the genre.
Marsh, whose real love was the theater, wrote 32 crime and detection novels featuring the gentlemanly Detective Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn. While most of her novels follow the traditional formula, Clutch of Constables (Roderick Alleyn Mysteries) strays a bit outside the usual pattern. While Alleyn is out of the country investigating an art forgery ring, his wife, painter Agatha Troy, fills in a few free days by impulsively booking a cruise on a winding English river. Her companions on this cruise are a brilliantly strange company played large enough to reach the back benches; many of Marsh's books have a theatrical setting but none of her characters are more stage-ready than this riverboat crowd.
The story is told in flashback format as Alleyn lectures on the case to students; for most of the riverboat story Alleyn is present only in his wife's letters to him. This book offers fans a chance to know Agatha Troy better and is a well done detection puzzle with red herrings and psychological overtones. Its greatest pleasure for me is the hypnotic winding river cruise, with landscape features dreamily going in and out of the scene with the river's turns. Of any book on my shelf, this is among the best suited to read during a jangled, stressful time; I feel myself slowing down, the river working its magic and the momentum of discovery taking us closer to the inevitable solution. Recently I needed to read this book yet again and it did its work as always.
If you are new to Dame Ngaio, this is not the most "representative" book to start with. I'd recommend Surfeit of Lampreys, Death at the Bar, Final Curtain, Singing in the Shrouds; possibly Died in the Wool. But if you do decide on a Ngaio Marsh sampler, by all means include the charming and hypnotic Clutch of Constables -- which title incidentally refers not to English bobbies on bicycles but to the English landscape painter John Constable.
Linda Bulger, 2008