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    Off With His Head
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    Off With His Head
    Unavailable
    Off With His Head
    Ebook344 pages5 hours

    Off With His Head

    By Ngaio Marsh

    3.5/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this ebook

    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.

    When the pesky Anna Bünz arrives at Mardian to investigate the rare survival of folk-dancing still practised there, she quickly antagonizes the villagers. But Mrs Bünz is not the only source of friction – two of the other enthusiasts are also spoiling for a fight.

    When the sword dancers’ traditional mock beheading of the Winter Solstice becomes horribly real, Superintendent Roderick Alleyn finds himself faced with a case of great complexity and of gruesome proportions…

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateOct 29, 2009
    ISBN9780007344727
    Unavailable
    Off With His Head
    Author

    Ngaio Marsh

    Dame Ngaio Marsh was born in New Zealand in 1895 and died in February 1982. She wrote over 30 detective novels and many of her stories have theatrical settings, for Ngaio Marsh’s real passion was the theatre. She was both an actress and producer and almost single-handedly revived the New Zealand public’s interest in the theatre. It was for this work that the received what she called her ‘damery’ in 1966.

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    Reviews for Off With His Head

    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      February was a month of first tries of well-respected authors. I grew up loving Agatha Christie – and I don’t know how I never heard of Ngaio Marsh before a couple of years ago. (And I’m not sure that, without the Internet, I would be familiar with her yet today.)This was my first Marsh because I won it from Bev at My Reader’s Block for completing a mini-challenge in last year’s Vintage Mysteries Reading Challenge, but it’s #19 in the Insepctor Roderick Alleyn series.I liked Alleyn and I thought the mystery was fairly clued, if a little confusing, since there was a heavy country dialect and an apparent assumption that the reader would have some knowledge of British country folk theatre.I’m definitely going to read lots more Marsh. This first try: 3½ starsRead this if: you have an interest in folk theatre, particularly in winter solstice dance rituals.
    • 5/5
      Here I enjoyed Marsh's very thorough research on old English folk plays. She had a background in theater and is always amusing when she uses a theater background.The setting is an English village not all that long after WWII. They are still coming to grips with changing their old ways. The rather threadbare aristocrats of the tale are obviously getting their fun out of tradition, since they are not yet comfortable with much else.
    • 2/5
      At this point in my rereading of Marsh I realize that I am having trouble seeing the books as they were received when first written and published. This particular story bothered me particularly for a number of reasons:First, Marsh's books continue to be painfully class ridden. Members of the gentry are well educated, speak standard English and either privately wealthy or hold down jobs as artists, lawyers or doctors. Members of the lower class are badly educated, speak painfully broad dialect and carry on the modern day equivalent of the jobs of their forebears. The books was published in 1956 and yet it reads as if it were a flashback to a time far earlier.Second, one expects the murder mystery writer to use smoke and mirrors to distract the reader from the "truth" of whodunnit. What is not reasonable is that her detectives should be able to solve the crimes they are investigating in little time if it were not for the fact that they are constantly unwilling to do their actual work. In earlier books Alleyn felt uncomfortable requiring fingerprints from suspects and in later books he seems to feel uncomfortable actually asking questions. People don't answer questions. Police don't ask questions. Suspects are allowed to mill around and move things. In this particular case the SPOILER WARNING!!!!! murderer spends much of the book ordering those who witnessed the murder to shut up whenever they come close to spilling the truth--in front of police officers. The only way Marsh can account for the difficulty of solving the case is to have the local police officers act like bucolic yokels and the men from Scotland Yard to spend more of their time deferring to the gentry and feeling uncomfortable asking questions than doing the work they were called in do to.Marsh does not limit her stereotyping to the gentry and the "peasants" either. The German woman in this book acts not like someone who has lived in England for years but rather as a recent refugee from the movie version of Nazi Germany. Marsh also throws in, for good measure, a rather nasty picture of the those who are 'inappropriately' interesting in British forkways. Appropriate interest is felt by members of the British gentry. Inappropriate interest is felt by foreigners who wear "different" clothes and speak with accents.Throw in a thoroughly broad and uninformed picture of epilepsy and you have a book that seems to have been designed to reflect the biases and preconceptions of the fairly narrow demographic that made up Marsh's readership.