Ngaio Marsh

In their Dorset village, neither Miss Campanula nor her friend Miss Prentice are known as lovable little old ladies. They're waspish, gossiping snobby little old ladies, passionate only about their amateur theatrical productions, their narrowly defined opinions about how everyone else should behave ...and, perhaps, about the local vicar. But could one of them have been sufficiently unpleasant to provoke a murderer? For Miss Campanula has perished...

During World War II, Colonel Claire-a tremendously nice fellow and a disastrously bad businessman-runs a mud-baths resort in rural New Zealand. But the place is on the brink of being taken over by a local blowhard who may be a Nazi spy. Inspector Alleyn has been sent in to sort things out-and don a disguise in order to blend in the resort's motley cast of characters-in this classic tale of detection from the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master....

Superintendent Alleyn's old school chum, nicknamed the "Boomer," has become the president of the newly emerged African nation of Ng'ombwana, newly emerged in the wake of colonialism. Old school ties being what they are, his friend-making an official visit to London-insists that Alleyn handle his security, rather than Her Majesty's Special Branch. The Special Branch is not best pleased about this, as the Boomer is known to have some very deadly enemies,...

Inspector Alleyn just wants to write a letter to his wife, but World War II, for one, keeps intruding. It's war-work, after all, that has brought Alleyn to this seedy hospital in New Zealand's hinterlands, and it's the war that has left the hospital swimming in convalescing soldiers - noisy, often drunk, and always over-interested in the nurses. Nor is the weather helping. A storm has killed the electrical power, leaving Alleyn, the soldiers, the...

The soprano Isabella Sommita was widely loathed, so much so that the problem with solving her murder is less a lack of plausible suspects than an embarrassment of options. On a lavish island estate, cut off from the mainland by a sudden storm, Roderick Alleyn is among the guests, and fortunately can take charge in the coppers' absence, in this delightful detective novel by the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master.

Upper Quintern is the sort of Little English Village that is home mostly to the very rich and the servants who make their lives delightful. But Sybil Foster's life is not delightful; exhausted from her various family stresses-- a daughter, for instance, who wants to marry a man without a title! ? Sybil takes herself off to a local hotel that specializes in soothing shattered nerves. When she's killed, Inspector Alleyn has a real puzzler on his hands....

Inspector Alleyn's wife, the artist Agatha Troy, has a special fondness for Constables-the paintings, that is, not the policemen. So she jumps at the chance to take a river cruise through "Constable Country" in the east of England, in honor of the nineteenth-century master of landscapes. Her enthusiasm dims a little, though, when it becomes clear that the ticket became available at the last minute only because a previous passenger was murdered in...

World War I hero Sir Henry Lanklander entrust his friend, Colonel cartarete, with one fineal request: that his memoirs be published at any cost. Soon after, the Colonel's bloudgeoned body is found near a river and Alleyn and Fox are called in to investigate.

Inspector Roderick Alleyn is a Scotland Yard detective whose aristocratic breeding gives him access to the elite and their crimes. This second set of elegant mysteries contains four episodes.