Dame Ngaio Marsh was born in New Zealand in 1895. Along with Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham and Dorothy Sayers she was admired as one of the original ‘Queens of Crime’, best known for her 32 crime novels featuring Detective Roderick Alleyn, published between 1934 and 1982, the year she died. In 1949 she had one million copies published on a single day (the 'Marsh Million'), a distinction she shared only with George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and Agatha Christie. Many of her stories have theatrical settings, reflecting Ngaio Marsh’s real passion, and as both actress and producer she almost single-handedly revived the New Zealand public’s interest in the theatre. It was for this work that the received what she called her ‘damery’ in 1966.
Stella Duffy is an acclaimed novelist and theatremaker who has twice won a prestigious CWA Dagger for her short stories, she won Stonewall Writer of the Year twice and the inaugural Diva Literary Prize for Fiction in 2017. Born in London, she spent her childhood in New Zealand, has written 16 novels, and is the co-director of the Fun Palaces campaign for greater access to culture for all, and was awarded an OBE for services to the Arts in 2016. Her website is www.stelladuffy.wordpress.com
'Stella Duffy performs a remarkable act of ventriloquism with New Zealand's Queen of Crime. I defy readers to see the join' VAL McDERMID ‘A proper Golden Age set up of suspects and plot, a wonderful sense of place and period, and a real frisson of being with Alleyn himself! I can’t imagine anyone doing it better – Stella Duffy is the natural successor to Dame Ngaio’ KATE MOSSE ‘Ngaio Marsh fans rejoice! After 35 years Alleyn is back in a new mystery – and both are as good as ever’ JOHN CURRAN ‘Marsh and Duffy have created A Midsummer Night’s Dream with corpses, clues and Kiwi accents. Ingenious indeed’ ANDREW TAYLOR, THE SPECTATOR ‘Fans all over the world will, I’m sure, hope that there are more stories to come.’ SOPHIE HANNAH, THE GUARDIAN ‘I absolutely love Ngaio Marsh! She's probably my favourite golden age doyenne’ A.J. FINN, author of The Woman in the Window ‘A more appropriate ‘completist’ author could hardly have been wished for’ MIKE RIPLEY, SHOTS Magazine ‘One of the most successful resurrections of another author’s character I’ve come across.’ DAILY TELEGRAPH ‘Clever stuff. Ngaio Marsh would give it nine out of ten’ DAILY MAIL ‘Duffy captures Marsh’s style, dialogue and mood brilliantly’ THE TIMES ‘A complicated tale, so well completed by Stella Duffy that I was quite unable to see the join’ LITERARY REVIEW “A taut atmospheric whodunit … Duffy’s facility at injecting wit into fair-play detecting will make Marsh fans hope she’ll continue the series.” PUBLISHERS WEEKLY “Though tart noir specialist Duffy might seem an unlikely choice to flesh out the skeleton Marsh left behind, fans will be hard-pressed to find the joint between the two writers.” KIRKUS REVIEW “An extraordinary literary tag-team completed 75 years after it began.” THE LISTENER (NZ)
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