I'm wary of books drafted by one author and finished by a new one, or books flat-out written in the style of an older author, maybe just because we collectively have been burned so many times before. But this was genuinely well done. It reads like Ngaio Marsh, is very faithful to her voice and just avoids the few questionable shades of opinion that have popped up occasionally in the past. Moreover, the story and writing are tighter than the last few books, very much returning her to the height of her writing. Brava.
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First the Money Disappears, Then the Bodies
Review of the Harper Collins paperback (2019) of the original Collins Crime Club hardcover (2018)

Money in the Morgue finds Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn in New Zealand where his creator Ngaio Marsh was able to periodically locate him from his regular duties at Scotland Yard's CID. Alleyn is undercover at a wartime hospital where there is suspicion of spying activity. When the hospital is cut off from the outside world during a storm, the medical payroll is stolen and Alleyn is forced to reveal his true profession as being the only policeman on hand to investigate the crime. But then further complications arise as deaths occur and bodies begin to mysteriously disappear.

I very much enjoyed Money in the Morgue for its reenactment of the Golden Age of Crime due to Stella Duffy's perfect continuation of Ngaio Marsh's abandoned few chapters. For whatever reason Marsh abandoned the project (perhaps it seemed too close to a similar spy hunt in Colour Scheme (1943)), Duffy has completed the book extremely well in capturing Alleyn's character and interactions with the suspects. There is even an Inspector Fox proxy character in Sergeant Bix. Let us hope that Stella Duffy continues with further Alleyn mysteries.

Trivia and Link
Read an article about Stella Duffy's completion of Money in the Morgue in The Guardian here. ( )

Set in New Zealand during WWII, this incomplete novel was started by Marsh, but never completed at her death in 1982. It was completed recently by Stella Duffy. Although badged as #33 in the Roderick Alleyn series, chronologically it's set between Colour Scheme (#12) and Died in the Wool (#13).

Roderick Alleyn has been sent to New Zealand during the war where he is spy hunting following Japan's entry into the war. He is posing as an author recuperating from a breakdown and is staying at the debt-ridden Mount Seager Hospital which has partly been taken over by the military. The hospital is at the end of a road in an isolated area, and it and the nearby pub are reached by crossing a rickety bridge which is barely passable to vehicles.

On Midsummer evening, the payroll driver is forced to overnight at the hospital because of a flat tyre; he has over £1000 in notes and specie with him, and the Matron suggests he puts the money in the hospital safe, along with some racetrack winnings of one of the nurses. During the night, the money is stolen, and the theft discovered...

Cue a murder that is not a murder, two pairs of lovers, a death that is not natural causes, and a set of tunnels that end in a glow worm cavern that is sacred to the local Māori tribe.

As with the Elizabeth Peters posthumously completed novel, I felt this was not particularly well done. I didn't think Duffy had caught Marsh's lightness in characterisation, and the writing felt rather ponderous in places. We don't know why Marsh never completed the novel, but I suspect it was because the spy plot was already used in Colour Scheme, and she may not have have wanted to continue it.

OK, but to my mind for completists only.

It’s 84 years since Dame Ngaio Marsh published the first Roderick Alleyn novel. Now he’s back, in a crime novel outlined by Marsh during the Second World War and completed by Stella Duffy in 2018. Review at Newtown Review of Books ( )

‘Murder. It always came back to murder.’

As a massive fan of Golden Age crime, and having read all of Ngaio Marsh’s books a long time ago, it was with some trepidation that I approached this. Indeed, I have put off reading it until now. How can a modern writer possibly come up with the voice, the style, of Marsh and re-create her most famous character, Chief Detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn? So, I’m not going to compare, or point out the impossibility of the whole enterprise (ok, well I might).

There is quite a lot to like about the book, but I was never convinced by it all. The setting was a take on a locked room or isolated mansion mystery: a remote military and civilian hospital where a sudden storm brings down the telephone lines and makes the only road into the place, over a rickety bridge, impassable. We have a set of characters and multiple plot lines going on: there is the theft of a large amount of wage money; the death of one of the patients, and then one of the staff; bodies go missing; a secret mission for Allen to try to uncover a spy network passing on messages to the Japanese (this being wartime New Zealand); there are secret tunnels running everywhere…. To be honest, I felt that there was just too much going on. There is a map at the start of the book but frankly I just gave up trying to work out where people were running to and from. Everyone has a secret (of course) and in the course of one night Allen has to try to solve what has happened. The denouement, where all the characters converge on the morgue, is – frankly - farcical, I’m afraid. As I said, it is a very long time since I read Marsh but it just didn’t seem at all like the book she would have written.

That’s not to say it isn’t a bit of fun, and some of the characters are gloriously loopy, some of the humour raising a smile. I think, too, that Duffy does capture something of the character of Alleyn, and of the country and landscape of Marsh’s native New Zealand. It also, nicely, feels like a tribute to Ngaio Marsh herself, with Stella Duffy throwing in lots of Shakespearean references, and setting up a re-enactment of the events with Alleyn as ‘director – both a nod to Marsh’s primary passion for the theatre and directing.

So, hmm, a bit of a bumpy ride, I guess. I read it more as a tribute to Ngaio Marsh, not an attempt to ‘write’ as she did. I’m not sure how much of a plot outline had been left in her notes, but the various threads of the book all felt a little forced, if I’m honest – at least for me. And the ending was more Carry On than Golden Age. An interesting read, for sure, which ultimately raises questions about the re-imagining of a writer’s work and style. Maybe we should just let sleeping dogs lie?
So probably 2.5 stars, but bumped up to 3 stars in memory of a grand old Dame of crime fiction. ( )