Night at the Vulcan

Summary: An actor is found dead in the actor’s dressing room at the end of a play. It appears to be suicide by gas asphyxiation, but Alleyn finds clues pointing to murder by someone in the company.

Another Ngaio Marsh theatre mystery. She loved the theatre and set a number of murders there. For once, Alleyn was not in the audience and a witness to the death!

Martyn Tarne is an aspiring actress come to London from New Zealand. At least before she was robbed of most of her funds and repeatedly rejected for parts. Her last stop was The Vulcan, where she heard a new play was being staged. But the cast has been finalized. The play begins in a few days. But all is not lost. She overhears that the female lead, Helena Hamilton, has lost her show more dresser. She asks for the job, and is afforded a place to stay, first at the theatre, and then with Jacques Dore, the set and costume designer.

There are a number of fraught relationships within the company. Helena’s former husband, Clark Bennington is a fading, alcoholic actor, relying more on tricks and upstaging others than skill, particularly provoking character actor J.G. Darcey. Helena has had a long term affair with Adam Poole, her male lead and also the manager of the theatre. Gay Gainsford is Bennington’s niece who he has been able to get cast, even though she is a poor fit for her part. Meanwhile, the playwright, Dr. Rutherford hangs about the theatre, cruelly ridiculing the actors, especially Gainsford.

Martyn adds to the tensions by her resemblance to Adam Poole. As it turns out, she is a distant relation. In the play, Gainsford plays a part in which her resemblance to Poole features in the climactic scene between the two, a scene that she hasn’t mastered in looks or acting. Tarne is asked to read for the part as an understudy and it is plain to everyone that she should have been cast for it, including Bennington and Gainsford.

So many possible murder victims. So many possible suspects. The murder is made to appear to be a suicide by gas asphyxiation, which has happened once before when the theatre was named the Jupiter (featured in a Marsh short story). But Alleyn finds evidence to the contrary, not the least that the victim’s makeup had been refreshed for the curtain call and had previously boast of a letter from an Otto Brod being a “trump card.”

One of the unusual features of this is that Alleyn, after several hours, solves the murder on the spot. There is the culminating scene of the whole cast gathered as Alleyn walks through the evidence–and then dismisses everyone–but the murderer doesn’t leave.

This is well-executed. About half the story builds up to the murder, and about half involves the investigation. This is Marsh at her best in her favorite setting! show less

Down-on-her-luck Martyn Tarne (yes, "Martyn" is a female name, which threw me off a bit until I figured it out) is applying for theatre work in England, having recently arrived from New Zealand. She's down to two shillings and a few-odd pence and is seriously considering sleeping in a homeless shelter for the night. However, luck is upon her when she arrives at the Vulcan Theatre: the dresser for the noted Helena Hamilton has been taken ill, so Martyn steps into the breach. But the theatre has a bit of a gloomy past: five years previously, someone was killed by the gas fire in the dressing room. The actors, being a superstitious lot, don't talk much about it. Imagine then how much it rattles them when one of their number appears to have show more committed suicide in much the same manner as the previous death. Or is it really suicide...?

This is a slow-burn book with a slightly rushed ending. The slow burn is at least diverting: Marsh, being a playwright, knows all about actors' foibles and quirks and is adept at describing the atmosphere of a theatre in different stages of a production. Anyone who has worked in theatre will recognize themselves at some point in the story (for me, I definitely remembered the nervous thrill of opening night and how it all feels slightly unreal). Once the death occurs, Alleyn and the troops come in and simply talk their way to a solution, which seemed a bit anticlimactic. So if you're planning to read this I would say the characters are a bigger draw than the actual plot. show less

Martyn Tarne, a young actress from New Zealand, arrives in England with no money and no immediate job prospects. After a fortnight of fruitless job-hunting, she arrives late for the auditions at the Vulcan Theatre - but not too late to overhear the leading lady's dresser is ill. It is not the sort of theatre work Martyn wants, but she's exhausted and desperate - and so, despite her lack of appropriate references, she applies.
The opening night of a new play is just days away, and relationships between some members of the cast and crew are strained. As an unlikely dresser, Martyn attracts a certain amount of attention, not all of it welcome.

This is a murder mystery, although considerable time passes before the murder occurs and Chief show more Detective-Inspector Alleyn arrives on the scene. It is not one of Marsh's better mysteries: the revelation lacks dramatic surprise and the denouncement has never struck me as being clever. The investigation is brief, and does not really even provide insight into 1950s police-methods - at one point, Alleyn turns to a young constable and says "[What I just did] was an almost flawless example of how an investigating officer is not meant to behave. You will be good enough to forget it."
And unlike some mysteries, where the romantic subplot can be half the reason for reading the book, Opening Night's romance is neither entertaining nor intelligent; in fact, I wish it was absent from the story entirely.

Nevertheless, Opening Night is one of the Ngaio Marsh mysteries I like to reread in its entirety. It mightn't be a great mystery, but it's a very interesting portrayal of a theatre approaching opening night. Marsh does a wonderful job of conveying the physical space of the theatre, the different jobs and people involved in a show, and the potential tensions between them - as well as the intentions of the play itself.
I like Martyn. I like the way her wishful thinking is challenged - she discovers it's one thing to daydream about getting a role on short notice, and another to hope for the misfortune of someone she knows so that she herself may have a chance. I love how Marsh captures Martyn's exhaustion throughout the novel - there's something remarkably evocative about it, and it makes Martyn easy to sympathise with.

It's disappointing that in Opening Night Marsh was unable to write a good mystery about the theatre, but that does not mean the novel is without any redeeming qualities. show less

Martyn Tarne, otherwise homeless in London, stumbles into the job of dresser for principle actress, Helena Hamilton. Martyn has come from New Zealand in the hopes of becoming a famous actress herself. Was it an accident that she ended up at a theater with bad luck? The building is shrouded in death. Even though she initially lands the job as a dresser for Helena Hamilton, three days later Marty finds herself on stage, acting in the production's opening night. Does her supposed biological connection to another actor play a part in this new role?
As part of the Roderick Allyn Murder Mystery series, Night at the Vulcan is #16 in the series. A connection back to prior Roderick Allyn mysteries: Mike Lamprey lived in New Zealand and had an show more uncle who was murdered when he was eight. The same Mr. Allyn investigating the tragedy at the Vulcan handled Mike Lamprey's uncle's case. show less

Marsh's novels about the theatre are overwrought and histrionic. It seems weird that she could write in this vein about a milieu and subject with which she was so familiar. One of the actors rapes his wife, and the teenage protagonist deflects the sexual overtures of the night watchman at the theatre. All of this is somewhat obliquely or ambiguously described, but no intelligent adult could miss it.

Night at the Vulcan (Opening Night) - Ngaio Marsh
Ngaio Marsh was known as one of the "Queens of Crime". She wrote 32 detective novels during the period 1934-1982 and Night at the Vulcan published in 1951 was number 17 and so just over halfway through the oeuvre. All the novels feature Inspector Roderick Alleyn a gentleman detective who works for the Metropolitan Police (London). Marsh's great passion was the theatre and all the action in this novel takes place in the Vulcan a refurbished London theatre that had suffered a tragedy some time before.

The time scale is fairly tight: all the action takes place over a three day period and starts with Martyn Tarne arriving at the theatre looking for work three days before the opening of a new show more play. She is employed as a dresser to the leading lady Helena Hamilton who is married to Clark Bennington who is on the skids, but has a part in the play. It is not until halfway through the novel that Inspector Allen and his team arrive after Clark Bennington appears to have committed suicide by gassing himself. The first half of the novel is therefore taken up with the workings of the theatre and Marsh creates this little world of actors and their staff preparing for the opening night. It is also a world that appears rather quaint being set in 1950 with its gas fires and its sightings of London buses through the windows of the theatre. Inspector Alleyn is politeness personified and his only role in the drama is the solving of the crime. The whole thing is a bit like a locked room mystery, which in the end is nicely worked out

I enjoyed the claustrophobic atmosphere of the theatre that Marsh has created and her characters were lively enough to keep me happily reading along to the end to discover the solution to the mystery. 3.5 stars. show less

This is the fourth Roderick Alleyn mystery by Ngaio Marsh that I have read in short order. I have noticed that she often takes her time introducing her characters and I have had different reactions to that. 1) Enjoyed the setup. 2) (Another book set in a theater as this one is --was a bit bored by the long setup though the book recaptured my interest and I did come to enjoy the characters. 3) N/A as things got off to a fast start.

In this case we go 100 pages (out of 170-something) before a murder occurs and Detective Alleyn shows up! I'll have to say that I did enjoy the setup here, as I found the characters interesting and character whose POV we share most of the time was a sympathetic one.

A fun, charming old fashioned mystery--my show more only complaint is two characters who only know each other for two or three days falling in love to the point of a proposal. show less