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 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! ( )

AKA: Opening Night in GB.

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 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. ( )

An unsatisfactory mystery with an equally unsatisfactory romance subplot.
A young woman emigrates to England, eager for a career in the theater. Down to a few coins, she miraculously comes across The Vulcan Theatre, which is in desperate need of a dresser. One thing leads to another in a most improbable set of coincidences, and the murder mystery is on.
Not Marsh’s best effort, although the mystery itself is decent enough. ( )

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. ( )