Blurbs for Ngaio Marsh Mysteries

(Note: Books are listed alphabetically.)

Enter a Murderer (1941)

by Ngaio Marsh

Pocket Books (1st printing, July 1941)

Cover price: not given

INTRODUCING A NEW MYSTERY-MISTRESS TO POCKETBOOK SLEUTHS!

'Enter Ngaio Marsh into the Hall of Fame of PocketBook mystery-masterpieces with Enter a Murderer -- and, as one critic puts it, this peeress of perplexing puzzlers "has Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie wondering if their crowns are on straight!"

'Enter a Murderer is brand-new to American mystery-addicts -- it has never before been published in an American edition. And it has every Ngaio Marsh quality of story, humor, character, and grim situation -- including agreeable Inspector Alleyn of the C. I. D. -- that won her the praise of her readers, her critics, and her fellow-authors alike, in books like A Man Lay Dead, Death at the Bar, Death of a Peer, and others.

'Incidentally, Ngaio, is pronounced "Nigh-o," proclaiming Miss Marsh's New Zealand extraction. She was successively a painter, playwright, actress, stage manager, and interior decorator before she turned to the production of top-notch whodunits. You'll pronounce Enter a Murderer "night perfect!"'

Overture to Death (1939)

by Ngaio Marsh

Pocket Books (1st printing, July 1943)

Cover price: not given

PRELUDE TO MURDER IN C SHARP MINOR

'The scene of Overture to Death is an English village, and the characters are a dozen or more of its assorted inhabitants, including the village squire, his son Henry who is in love with the Rector's daughter, the local medico, the squire's spinster cousin who runs his household, the town's leading spinster, Idris Campanula, and others. Of course there's the charming Chief Detective-Inspector Roderick Alleyn of Scotland Yard.

'So cleverly is the stage set, and so well drawn and human the characters, that when one of them is killed right before the eyes of the others, the reader can almost feel himself among those present. The murder, baffling and bizarre, is a piece of consummate artistry made plausible by the convincing psychological explanation of the underlying motives. Such disparate items are involved in the plot as an amateur theatrical, an onion, a sore finger, Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C Sharp Minor, a water pistol, aspidistras and repressed emotions.'

Note: Down in the lower right-hand corner in a small black box with white text superimposed is this:

'Send this book to a boy in the armed forces anywhere for only 3 cents.'