stonepicnicking_okapi

I enjoy the Inspector Alleyn series by Ngaio Marsh (books only, I've not see the TV adaptations). I haven't read all of them, but I have read most of the early ones, those are the ones I prefer. I enjoy reading the stories set in her native New Zealand. Colour Scheme has an especially ingenious murder device. Much like Harriet Vane, I like Troy (who becomes Alleyn's wife) in herself, as an artist, much more than as 'wife of the detective.' I like reading about the way Marsh, who was also an artist, writes about her artistic process. I could do without the moralizing. And it's always struck me as odd that the sticking point in Alleyn & Troy is getting together is that Troy doesn't believe in capital punishment, and Alleyn as a detective sends people to the gallows. It always strikes me as a bizarre hurdle. I don't enjoy the ones with their son Ricky. I DNF one I tried recently (Spinsters in Jeopardy). I am just not a fan of Mom Pain as a major plot point and Ricky gets kidnapped in that one. Also the drug trade/drug crime is a difficult one for a traditional Golden Age of Crime writer to pull off. It never seems realistic. And there's always a tendency to moralize. One of the best parts of Alleyn is his friendship with Inspector Fox so I wrote a ficlet for vocab_drabbles which covers an 'Untold Case' mentioned in Artists in Crime.

Title: Fox's Arson Case
Fandom: Inspector Alleyn - Ngaio Marsh
Rating: Gen
Word Count: 550
Prompt: epistolary
Characters/Pairings: Fox & Alleyn
Warnings: None
Summary: At the beginning of Artists in Crime, Alleyn writes: Fox has written regularly. He seems to have done damn well over that arson case. So this is a letter from Fox to Alleyn about the arson case.

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