Sophie Gee

Oh, wow, Jonty, it's absolutely perfect.

And just to remind listeners, the Detection Club was, of course, the gathering of detective fiction writers who basically talked about their craft and how they were going to kind of prosecute their next detection stories.

I'm Sophie Gee, a colonial outsider raised in the Antipodes in Oceania, hoping to make it back to London where I can become part of the continental milieu of great detective writers with a keen interest in the theatre and a great love of shopkeeping.

This week, Vintage Murder by Naio Marsh.

So vintage murder is, to repeat the phrase of last week's episode, short, taut and fraught.

It was a great phrase, John D. I'm glad that you've revived it.

I also realized as you did your sparkling, pun intended, introduction there, that the title itself is a canny pun because presumably the Jeroboam, which crashes into Alfie's head, is a vintage champagne.

Of course.

Yeah, I thought it was just, you know, because it was a real classic.

It's a locked room mystery, and it's set in a provincial playhouse in New Zealand.

And what makes the book a masterpiece of the genre is the way that Marsh uses her story to make a much deeper investigation into the white colonial experience.

So she creates a tension between three factions in this novel, the imperial mentality of the Carolyn Dacre's company,

who are visiting from London to do a provincial tour, the colonial subservience of the New Zealand police force, who are sort of hopeless and bumbling in the way that police forces always are, but with the additional zing of a colonial commentary.

and the irrepressible agency of Maori culture, which is probably the most interesting aspect of the book.

There's an uneasy truce established between these three forces and it's shattered by the giant exploding bottle of fizz.

So while Roderick Allen, the detective, has everyone metaphorically sipping together by the end,

the tensions in the book remain unresolved.

And this is really what's so great about it.

Vintage murder is a great thriller and it's also a disturbing and fascinating portrait of late British imperialism.

And the New Zealand setting really just adds to it because we are accustomed to India, we're accustomed to Australia and perhaps the West Indies as colonial settings.