Ngaio Marsh Quotes

Above all things -- read. Read the great stylists who cannot be copied rather than the successful writers who must not be copied.

We do not wait for inspiration. We work because we've jolly well got to. But when all is said and done, we toil at this particular job because it's turned out to be our particular job, and in a weird sort of way I suppose we may be said to like it.

You may be able to write a novel, you may not. You will never know until you have worked very hard indeed and written at least part of it. You will never really know until you have written the whole of it and submitted it for publication.

There are people to whom one need not show off. It’s a great comfort sometimes.

It's like one of those affairs in books," said Bailey disgustedly."Someone trying to think up a new way to do a murder. Silly, I call it." "What do you say, Roper?" said Alleyn. "To my way of thinking, sir," said Sergeant Roper, "these thrillers are ruining our criminal classes.

It is a curious thing that when one speaks from the heart it is invariably in the worst of taste.

Stop talking. Can't you see I'm detecting?

You must be able to write. You must have a sense of form, of pattern, of design. You must have a respect for and a mastery over words.

Why do you want to become an author? I will accept only one answer. If it is because you feel you can write better than you can do anything else then go ahead and do it without frills and flourishes. Stick to your present job and write in your spare time: but do it as if it is a whole time job.

My poor fat Alfie! He was not a romantic husband, but he was so kind and understanding. He never minded whether I was amusing or dull. He thought it impossible that I could be dull. I didn't have to bother about any of that.

Everybody talks to me about ‘P.M.s,’” complained Chief Detective-Inspector Alleyn to Inspector Fox on Monday afternoon, “and I never know whether they mean post-mortem or Prime Minister. Really, it’s very difficult when you happen to be involved with both.

Please don't entertain for a moment the utterly mistaken idea that there is no drudgery in writing. There is a great deal of drudgery in even the most inspired, the most noble, the most distinguished writing. Read what the great ones have said about their jobs; how they never sit down to their work without a sigh of distress and never get up from it witout a sigh of relief. Do you imagine that your Muse is forever flamelike -- breathing the inspired word, the wonderful situation, the superb solution into your attentive ear? ... Believe me, my poor boy, if you wait for inspiration in our set-up, you'll wait for ever.

She's extremely common, but that doesn't matter. Lots of common people are charming. Like bounders. I believe no woman ever falls passionately in love with a man unless he has just the least touch of the bounder somewhere in his composition.

in spite of all her misgivings, she glowed and thought to herself. ‘This is my place. This is where I belong.

books by her favorite “Golden Age” British mystery writers—Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, John Dickson Carr, and Agatha Christie—evil

With a slightly accentuated jaw-line, Inspector Alleyn advanced to the footlights and gazed into the swimming darkness of the stalls. "Mr. Bathgate," he said. Silence. "Mr. Bathgate," lied Alleyn, "I can see you." "You're not looking in my direction at all," declared an indignant voice. "Come

The Sittaford Mystery (1931) by Agatha Christie The Nine Tailors (1934) by Dorothy L. Sayers The Corpse in the Snowman (1941) by Nicholas Blake Tied Up in Tinsel (1972) by Ngaio Marsh The Shining (1977) by Stephen King Gorky Park (1981) by Martin Cruz Smith Smilla’s Sense of Snow (1992) by Peter Høeg A Simple Plan (1993) by Scott Smith The Ice Harvest (2000) by Scott Phillips Raven Black (2006) by Ann Cleeves

He was shown into the drawing-room, an apartment of great elegance and no character. Above the mantelpiece hung a portrait in pastel of Cicely O’Callaghan. The artist had dealt competently with the shining texture of the dress and hair, and had made a conscientious map of the face. Alleyn felt he would get about as much change from the original as he would from the picture.

I tell you what,” said Troy more amiably. “I’ve always been frightened of the whole business. Love and so on.” “The physical side?” “Yes, that, but much more than that. The whole business. The breaking down of all one’s reserves. The mental as well as the physical intimacy.” “My mind to me a kingdom is.

Do you read crime fiction?” “I dote on it. It’s such a relief to escape from one’s work into an entirely different atmosphere.” “It’s not as bad as that,” Nigel protested. “Perhaps not quite as bad as that. Any faithful account of police investigations, in even the most spectacular homicide case, would be abysmally dull. I should have thought you’d seen enough of the game to realise that. The files are a plethora of drab details, most of them entirely irrelevant. Your crime novelist gets over all that by writing grandly about routine work and then selecting the essentials. Quite rightly. He’d be the world’s worst bore if he did otherwise.

You are quite right, Fox. Never quote, and if you do certainly not from Macbeth.

It was as though they had so saturated themselves with professional behaviourism that they had lost the knack of being natural.

Well, ain’t you the clam’s cuticle!” said Mr. Ogden.

Alleyn asked for an adjournment; the whole affair ended, leaving the onlookers with a sense of having been served with treason when they ordered murder.

It’s so unreal and beastly.’ ‘Murder is beastly. Unfortunately it’s not unreal.

same smell of lavender and honeysuckle and oily wool. We’re crutching

What do you think, Mr Alleyn? If there's another war will the young chaps come at it, same as we did, thinking it's great? And get the same jolt? What do you reckon?" "I'm afraid to speculate," said Alleyn.

Any faithful account of police investigations, in even the most spectacular homicide case would be abysmally dull. I should have thought you'd seen enough of the game to realize that. The files are a plethora of drab details, most of them entirely irrelevant. Your crime novelist gets over all that by writing grandly about routine work and then seleting the essentials. Quite rightly. He'd be the world's worst bore if he did otherwise.

Until this moment Chloris and Mandrake had wished above all things for the assurance that Alleyn would take charge. Now that, with a certain crispness and a marked change of manner, he had actually done so, each of them felt an icy touch of apprehension. They had set in motion a process which they were unable to stop. They were not yet nervous for themselves but instinctively they moved a little nearer to each other. They had called in the Yard.

As for Mr. Ogden, he would have broken out immediately into a long discourse in which the words “uplift,” “renooal,” and “spiritual regeneration” would have sounded again and again, for Mr. Ogden was so like an American as to be quite fabulous.

Stop!" Hersey cried out. "Stop! something appalling is happening to all of us. We're saying things we'll regret for the rest of our lives." "We're merely speaking the truth" [William Compline] "It's the sort that shouldn't be spoken. It's a beastly lop-sided exaggerated truth.

Don't you know about The Others? They're the ones that leave nails and broken glass on the road. They hide things when you're in a hurry. They've only got one arm and one leg each, you know. So they take single gloves and stockings, and they're frightfully keen on keys and unanswered letters.

Look here,' said Nigel suddenly, 'let's pretend it's a detective novel. Where would we be by this time? About halfway through, I should think. Well, who's your pick' 'I am invariably gulled by detective novels. No herring so red but I raise my voice and give chase.' 'Don't be ridiculous.' said Nigel. 'Fact. You see in real detection herrings are so often out of season.' 'Well, never mind, who's your pick?' 'It depends on the author. If it's Agatha Christie, Miss Wade's occulted guilt drips from every page. Dorothy Sayers's Lord Peter would plump for Pringle, I fancy. Inspector French would go for Ogden. Of course, Ogden, on the face of it, is the first suspect.

A woman with a huge angry short-haired tabby in her arms came through from the surgery. The newly named Lucy’s fur rose. She made a noise that suggested she had come to the boil. The tabby suddenly let out a yell. Dogs made ambiguous comments in their throats. “Oh Lor’!” said the newcomer. She grinned at Mr. Whipplestone. “Better make ourselves scarce,” she said, and to her indignant cat: “Shut up, Bardolph, don’t be an ass.

weather forecast that it was going to be rough and had taken a pill. Miss Abbott was tramping up and down the narrow lower deck, having, perhaps instinctively, hit upon that part of the ship which after the first few hours is deserted by almost everyone. In the plan shown to passengers it was called the promenade deck. It was Jemima who first noticed the break in the weather. A kind of thin warmth fell across the page of her book;

Galsworthy made one of his characters—a lawyer, I think—say that once you have set in motion the chariot wheels of Justice, you can do nothing at all to arrest or deflect their progress. Lady O'Callaghan, that is the exact truth. You, very properly, decided to place this tragic case in the hands of the police. In doing so you switched on a piece of complicated and automatic machinery which, once started, you cannot switch off. As the police officer in charge of this case I am simply a wheel in the machine. I must complete my revolutions.

What I'd like is a case. You know how it happens in these crime stories, chaps....I read a good many of them and it's always the same thing. The keen young P. C. happens to be on the spot when there's a homicide, His Super has to call in the Yard and before you know where you are the P. C.'s working with one of the Big Four and getting praised for his witty deductions.

The coroner summed up at considerably length and with commendable simplicity. His manner suggested that the jury as a whole was certifiable as mentally unsound, but that he knew his duty and would perform it in the teeth of stupidity.

My good Harper, I have no notion. Fortunately I was becalmed near a garage. The fellow thrust his head among her smoking entrails, uttered some mumbojumbo, performed suitable rites with oil and water, and I was able to continue

Beneath it hung a faded photograph in an Oxford frame. It presented a Victorian gentleman wearing an ineffable air of hauteur and a costume which suggested that he had begun to dress up as Mr. Sherlock Holmes but, suddenly losing interest, had gone out fishing instead.

With corpses stiffening on the premises, sir, all things be possible to a man with a desperate powerful idea egging him on.

For some reason that he had never been able to understand, Mandrake was a man in whom his fellow-creatures confided. He was by no means obviously sympathetic and he seldom asked for confidences but, perhaps because of these very omissions, they came his way.

They were fortified with all the resilience that youth presents to an emotional shock. In the midst of murder and attempted suicide, they had managed, not only to behave with address and good sense, but all to fall in love with each other.

Honestly, Jonathan, I begin to think you are suffering from some terrible form of insanity the idée fixe. People may drown in your ornamental waters or perish in your snow-drifts, and all you can think of is your hell-inspired party.

If you're going to ask me to provide myself with three nice little alibis," said Hersey, "you may as well know straight away that I can't do it. I seem to remember reading somewhere that that makes me innocent and I'm sure I hope it's true" "It's in the best tradition of detective fiction, I understand," said Allyen with a smile.

Desirée wore black for her April Fool’s party. On any other woman of her age it would have been a disastrous dress but, by virtue of a sort of inner effrontery, she got away with it. Her neck, her bosom and that dismal little region, known, prettily, as the armpit, were all so many statements of betrayal, but she triumphed over them and not so much took them in her own stride as obliged other people to take them in theirs.

Fox, in many ways ours is a degrading job-of-work. Custom makes monsters of us all. Do you ever feel like that about it, Fox? No, I don't think you do. You are too nice-minded.

I do not imagine; detectives aren’t allowed to imagine. They note probabilities. I

Is it Locke who says that it is one thing to show a man he is in error and another to convince him of the truth? You have shown me my error. Pray reveal the whole truth.

I quite appreciate your scruples, but they are not worth much when they are used to screen a murderer or to cast suspicion on an innocent person.

Quis, quid, ubi, quibus auxiliis, cur, quomodo, quando?

What was the crime, who did it, when was it done, and where? How done, and with what motive, who in the deed did share?

It’s a curious thing that when one speaks from the heart it is invariably in the worst of taste.

Before he had completed this thought, the peak of the mountain was flooded with thin rose colour, too austere to be theatrical, but so vivid that its beauty was painful. He felt that kind of impatience and disquietude that sudden beauty brings. He could not stand and watch the flood of warmth flow down the flanks of the mountain nor the intolerable transfiguration of the sky.

My sister, Fanny Winterbottom,” said Miss Emily, two days later, “once remarked with characteristic extravagance (nay, on occasion, vulgarity), that, wherever I went, I kicked up as much dust as a dancing dervish.

the “Sonia Gluck as I knew her” gag?

her book. Ngaio Marsh. Myrna was re-reading the classics.

The Romans say, 'You must', the Protestant Nonconformists say, 'You must not', the Catholic Church of England says, 'You may.' [regarding the practice of confession; Overture to Death, chapter 17]

Внезапно он понял, что потребность рассказать все именно ей и возникла оттого, что она придавала этой истории так мало значения. Сочувствие только бы усилило мрачность переживания. А равнодушие к его навязчивым страхам заставило впервые задуматься, уж не являются ли они просто ненужным преувеличением чувств.

- ... Проблема в том, что у суперинтенданта совершенно некстати аппендицит осложнился перитонитом, поэтому начальство хочет, чтобы за это дело взялись мы. Ты что-то сказал? – Нет. – А то шум какой-то. – Это я зубами скриплю, наверное.

«Это не поза, — подумал Аллейн, — это уморасположение: баронесса Ван дер Вегель (и, очевидно, ее муж) неподдельно благочестивы и, — подумал он, искоса взглянув на этрусскую улыбку, — по всей вероятности, она обладает той спокойной беспощадностью, которая очень часто соседствует с пуританством».

Самое неправдоподобное в гангстерских фильмах – то, как там показывают связанного человека: стоит развязать жертву, как она, пошатнувшись раз-другой, вновь становится прыгучей, как блоха, и идет в драку. Если когда-нибудь развяжут Рики, ноги его не послушаются, рук он не почувствует, а голова будет так болеть, что просто безвольно повиснет, как увядший цветок.

You have to dig deep to bury your daddy.

... In our midst—in our very midst, Matron—are secret agents, secret societies, powers of evil known to the Yard but unsuspected by the general public. Mercifully so." He stopped short, folded his arms, and wondered how much of this the woman would swallow. Apparently the whole dose.

Nash, who carried in his head a sort of social ladder, had quietly decided that police officers of all ranks were to be graded with piano tuners.

Ah,” said Dr. Hart, “this is a pet theory of my own. The actual ‘he’ is known to nobody.” “Does the actual ‘he’ even exist?” Jonathan returned. “May it not be argued that ‘he’ has no intrinsic reality since different selfs arise out of a conglomeration of selfs to meet different events?

They do a certain amount of mischief, they're an almighty nuisance, but as murderers I've no real faith in the British anarchist.

four Queens of Crime—Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh

Classic crime,’ says Benedict. ‘Peggy loved these writers. I do too. Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie. Sheila Atkins.

The answer to that one must depend largely upon motive and motive is one of the secondary elements in police investigation. The old tag jog-trotted through his mind. “Quis? Quid? Ubi? Quibus auxilis? Cur? Quomodo? Quando?” Which might be rendered: “Who did the deed? What was it? Where was it done? With what? Why was it done? And how done? When was it done?

It was singular. It was damned odd. He must have touched a letter under her pillow because when he straightened up

I become facetious when perplexed. Right now I am perplex’d in the extreme.

Human nature being what it is, sometimes the company of other people is all the irritant required to form a pearl of revelation

clock in a jeweller’s window gave the time as twenty-three minutes to five. She knew, by the consequential scurry of its second-hand, that it was alive. It was surrounded by other clocks that made mad dead statements of divergent times as if, she thought, to set before her the stages of that day’s fruitless pilgrimage.

People,” he said, “talk about eyes and mouths as if they had something to do with the way other people think and behave. Only bits of the body, aren’t they? Like navels and knees and toenails. Arrangements.

and

By shifting his gaze slightly, he saw frame in the sitting room window, a landscape aloof from man. Its beauty was perfectly articulate yet utterly remote. Against his will he was moved by it as an unmusical listener may be profoundly disturbed by sound forms that he is unable to comprehend.

Order me some of that delicious-looking lager those people are drinking and I’ll reveal everything,’ said Angela.

You fatuous old bag of tripe!

The merciless scent of flowers was so heavy here that it hung like mist on the cold air. The room was crowded with flowers. In the centre, on three shrouded trestles, Robert Gospell’s body lay in its coffin.

He’s the boss, after all,” Troy thought as he left on his wife’s arm.

Henry spared a moment to regret his own decision to give up hunting. He had loved it so much: the sound, the smell, the sight of the hunt. It had all seemed so perfectly splendid until one day, quite suddenly as if a new pair of eyes had been put into his head, he had seen a mob of well-fed expensive people, with red faces, astraddle shiny quadrupeds, all whooping ceremoniously after a very small creature which later on was torn to pieces while the lucky ones sat on their horses and looked on, well satisfied. To his violent annoyance, he had found that he could not rid himself of this unlovely picture and, as it made him feel slightly sick, he had given up everything but drag-hunting.

The clocks in the hotel, and the clocks outside in the town, all began to strike six as he got into bed, and when the last clock had struck, the vague rumour of innumerable cockcrows rang in his head. And as he fell asleep he heard the first chatter of waking birds.

Every sleuth ought to have a tame half-wit, to make him feel clever.

Hospodi bozhe moy!

where curiosity could be assuaged, prestige maintained, and personal responsibility dissolved. With