Death on the Air: and other stories. Ngaio Marsh
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Название: Death on the Air: and other stories
Автор: Ngaio Marsh
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Зарубежные детективы
isbn: 9780007502059
isbn:
Death on the Air and Other Stories
Ngaio Marsh
HarperCollinsPublishers
77–85 Fulham Palace Road
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1995
First published in the USA as The Collected Short Fiction of Ngaio Marsh by International Polygonics Ltd 1989
Copyright © Ngaio Marsh (Jersey) Limited 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: 9780006512332
Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780007502059 Version: 2014-12-08
Table of Contents
Chapter And Verse: the Little Copplestone Mystery
What was so special about Ngaio Marsh? For a start she was one of the select band of female writers – those so-called ‘Queens of Crime’ – who dominated the world of the classical detective story in its heyday during the first half of the century. Yet unlike her rivals, writing was never her first love; she trained as a painter and later devoted herself to the theatre. In addition she was a New Zealander who, although a devoted Anglophile, was able to write about English life from the standpoint of a spectator – and the onlooker, as the well-known saying goes, sees most of the game.
This unusual background suffuses her work and sets her apart from her famous contemporaries. She writes better than Agatha Christie, and unlike Dorothy Sayers Ngaio Marsh never commits the sin of falling in love with her detective and lapsing into sentimentality. An elegant, disciplined writer, Marsh deserves to be read and reread not just for her plots but for her characterization, for her painter’s eye view and for her outsider’s insights into the heart of a vanished social world. But most important of all, her books provide such satisfying entertainment; amusing and civilized but with an underlying sensitivity and compassion, they bring grace to a genre not noted for emotional depth. Ngaio Marsh was not just a manufacturer of literary crossword puzzles. She was a supremely readable storyteller who time and again compelled the reader to race eagerly onwards to the final page.
An only child, she was born in a suburb of Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1895. Her father was a bank clerk СКАЧАТЬ