Book Review: Clutch of Constables
I 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 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.
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.