Inspector Alleyn 3-Book Collection 1: A Man Lay Dead, Enter a Murderer, The Nursing Home Murder

Inspector Alleyn 3-Book Collection 1: A Man Lay Dead, Enter a Murderer, The Nursing Home Murder
Ngaio Marsh

Commemorating 75 years since the Empress of Crime’s first book, the first volume in a set of omnibus editions presenting the complete run of 32 Inspector Alleyn mysteries.A MAN LAY DEADSir Hubert Handesley's extravagant weekend house-parties are deservedly famous for his exciting Murder Game. But when the lights go up this time, there is a real corpse with a real dagger in the back. All seven suspects have skilful alibis - so Chief Detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn has to figure out the whodunit…ENTER A MURDERERThe crime scene was the stage of the Unicorn Theatre, when prop gun fired a very real bullet; the victim was an actor clawing his way to stardom using bribery instead of talent; and the suspects included two unwilling girlfriends and several relieved blackmail victims. The stage is set for one of Roderick Alleyn's most baffling cases…THE NURSING HOME MURDERA Harley Street surgeon and his attractive nurse are almost too nervous to operate. Their patient is the Home Secretary - and they both have very good personal reasons to want him dead. The operation is a complete success - but he dies within hours, and Inspector Alleyn must find out why…

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Ngaio Marsh

Copyright (#ulink_f29c62d4-42e5-57d7-b53d-5de8331f4d2c)

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

A Man Lay Dead first published in Great Britain by Geoffrey Bles 1934

Enter a Murderer first published in Great Britain by Geoffrey Bles 1935

The Nursing Home Murder first published in Great Britain by Geoffrey Bles 1935

Roderick Alleyn and Moonshine first published in Great Britain in Death on the Air and Other Stories by HarperCollinsPublishers 1995

Ngaio Marsh asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of these works.

Copyright © Ngaio Marsh Ltd 1934, 1935

Roderick Alleyn and Moonshine copyright © Ngaio Marsh (Jersey) Ltd 1989

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007328697

Ebook Edition © June 2013 ISBN: 9780007531462

Version: 2018-09-04

Contents

Title Page (#uc6a70146-210c-5f65-bd08-c26eeb410fd8)

Copyright (#ufa8d5286-8abc-5579-a34e-bb135caa2c59)

Introduction: Roderick Alleyn

A Man Lay Dead

Enter a Murderer

The Nursing Home Murder

Bonus Story: Moonshine (#litres_trial_promo)

Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

INTRODUCTION (#uf46382d2-e759-5cc4-89b5-ea39701873a2)

Roderick Alleyn (#uf46382d2-e759-5cc4-89b5-ea39701873a2)

He was born with the rank of Detective-Inspector, CID, on a very wet Saturday afternoon in a basement flat off Sloane Square, in London. The year was 1931.

All day, rain splashed up from the feet of passers-by going to and fro, at eye level, outside my water-streaked windows. It fanned out from under the tyres of cars, cascaded down the steps to my door and flooded the area. ‘Remorseless’ was the word for it and its sound was, beyond all expression, dreary. In view of what was about to take place, the setting was, in fact, almost too good to be true.

I read a detective story borrowed from a dim little lending library in a stationer’s shop across the way. Either a Christie or a Sayers, I think it was. By four o’clock, when the afternoon was already darkening, I had finished it, and still the rain came down. I remember that I made up the London coal fire of those days and looked down at it, idly wondering if I had it in me to write something in the genre. That was the season, in England, when the Murder Game was popular at weekend parties. Someone was slipped a card saying he or she was the ‘murderer’. He or she then chose a moment to select a ‘victim’, and there was a subsequent ‘trial’. I thought it might be an idea for a whodunit – they were already called that – if a real corpse was found instead of a phony one. Luckily for me, as it turned out, I wasn’t aware until much later that a French practitioner had been struck with the same notion.

I played about with this idea. I tinkered with the fire and with an emergent character who might have been engendered in its sulky entrails: a solver of crimes.

The room had grown quite dark when I pulled on a mackintosh, took an umbrella, plunged up the basement steps and beat my way through rain-fractured lamplight to the stationer’s shop. It smelt of damp news-print, cheap magazines, and wet people. I bought six exercise books, a pencil and pencil sharpener and splashed back to the flat.

Then with an odd sensation of giving myself some sort of treat, I thought more specifically about the character who already had begun to take shape.

In the crime fiction of that time, the solver was often a person of more or less eccentric habit with a collection of easily identifiable mannerisms. This, of course, was in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes. Agatha Christie’s splendid M Poirot had his moustaches, his passion for orderly arrangements, his frequent references to ‘grey cells’. Dorothy L Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey could be, as I now am inclined to think, excruciatingly facetious. Nice Reggie Fortune said – and author H C Bailey had him say it very often – ‘My dear chap! Oh, my dear chap!’ and across the Atlantic there was Philo Vance, who spoke a strange language that his author, S S Van Dine, had the nerve to attribute, in part, to Balliol College, Oxford.

Faced with this assembly of celebrated eccentrics, I decided, on that long-distant wet afternoon, that my best chance lay in comparative normality: in the invention of a man with a background resembling that of the friends I had made in England, and that I had better not tie mannerisms, like labels, round his neck. (I can see now that with my earlier books I did not altogether succeed in this respect.)

I thought that my detective would be a professional policeman but, in some ways, atypical: an attractive, civilized man with whom it would be pleasant to talk but much less pleasant to fall out.

He began to solidify.

From the beginning I discovered that I knew quite a lot about him. Indeed, I rather think that, even if I had not fallen so casually into the practice of crime writing and had taken to a more serious form, he would still have arrived and found himself in an altogether different setting.

He was tall and thin with an accidental elegance about him and fastidious enough to make one wonder at his choice of profession. He was a compassionate man. He had a cock-eyed sense of humour, dependent largely upon understatement, but for all his unemphatic, rather apologetic ways, he could be a formidable person of considerable authority. As for his background, that settled itself there and then: he was a younger son of a Buckinghamshire family and had his schooling at Eton. His elder brother, whom he regarded as a bit of an ass, was a diplomatist, and his mother, whom he liked, a lady of character.

I remember how pleased I was, early in his career, when one of the reviews called him ‘that nice chap, Alleyn’, because that was how I liked to think of him: a nice chap with more edge to him than met the eye – a good deal more, as I hope it has turned out. The popular press of his early days would refer to him as ‘the handsome inspector’, a practice that caused him acute embarrassment.

On this day of his inception I fiddled about with the idea of writing a tale that would explain why he left the Diplomatic Service for the Police Force, but somehow the idea has never jelled.