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Originally Posted by HarryT
Just finished "Opening Night" (also published as "Night at the Vulcan") by Ngaio Marsh, the 16th book in the "Inspector Alleyn" series. Set, like so many of her other books, in the world of the theatre, in this book an actor dies on the opening night of a new play. Was it suicide or murder? Alleyn has to decide.
Thoroughly enjoyed this one (although I did guess the solution relatively early on in the book). It's not the murder that really "matters" with Ngaio Marsh's books, but the wonderful characters that she evokes, and this book is no exception to that. A complete contrast to the 2-dimensional "stock" characters one tends to find in so many of Agatha Christie's novels.
Highly recommended. Nothing too taxing here, but thoroughly enjoyable. One of the nice things about the Alleyn series is that it's not "frozen in time", and in this book, published in 1951, we see the reintroduction, as a young man, of a character we encountered as a child in the 1940 novel "Surfeit of Lampreys".
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I agree, I've enjoyed the Alleyn books a great deal. (There are also excellent Audible versions, BTW.) The characters develop over time, and are actually more than simple flat, 2-dimensional entities. I'm thinking it must be close to time to go back through them again.