Since April, 2003, I’ve been slowly working my way through
Ngaio Marsh’s Inspector Alleyn mysteries in chronological
order. The last one I read and reviewed, A Wreathe for Rivera,
was an accident; somehow I accidentally skipped over the present novel.
I go into this only because Final Curtain occupies a key place
in the sequence–Roderick Alleyn spends the years of World War II doing
anti-espionage work in New Zealand, and is parted from his wife, the
artist Agatha Troy, for the duration. This is the book in
which he returns from New Zealand, is reunited with Troy (as he calls
her), and takes up his police duties once again.

Consequently, the book is fraught with tension. Alleyn and Troy hadn’t
been married long when the war broke out, and haven’t seen each other in
over four years; both are concerned that whatever magic they had for each
other has evaporated. And no sooner is Alleyn home than he ends up
investigating a murder to which his wife is a prime witness; this is difficult for
him, as he first got to know her during an unpleasant murder investigation
(in Artists in Crime, and it caused such trouble between them
that since then he’s been trying to keep his home and work lives
compartmentalized. And now all of those mental barriers are necessarily
falling.

The quintessence of the English murder mystery is the country house
mystery, which, as Marsh seems to delight in avoiding cliche, is probably
why this is only her third novel in that sub-genre. And, typically, it’s
not just a country house mystery; Marsh brings in her beloved
theater by making it a country house mystery about actors.

Sir Henry Ancred is a famous Shakespearian actor, now nearing the end of
a long and productive and highly emotional life. He’s the patriarch of a
large dramatic family; not all are actually on the stage, but the only
one of his descendants who isn’t giving to making scenes and
over-dramatizing every little thing is in fact a theater producer. He
browbeats Troy, who is eagerly awaiting her husband’s return and not much
interested in working, into coming to his stately home, Ancreton, and
painting his portrait. Thus, Troy becomes our viewpoint character for the
first half of the book. While there she meets his unspeakable family and
the young starlet they fear he will marry, and
when he dies in bed after an overly rich dinner and a fit of rage she has a
niggling feeling that perhaps his death wasn’t entirely natural.

She and Alleyn discuss it, and are the verge of forgetting the whole
thing when the CID receives an anonymous letter claiming that Sir Henry’s
death was murder. Alleyn must find out whether it was murder, and
whodunnit, and reconcile his job with his married state.

All in all, not a bad outing.