Tied up in Tinsel

As a traditional country house mystery, Tied up in Tinsel works well for Christmas, although I’m not so sure about the characters. All the house guests are posh except for one - an Alfred Doolittle 'cockernee' type. The token bright young thing is a Sloane Ranger who uses words like groovy to show that she is trendy. Marsh's detective Superintendent Roderick Alleyn is very posh and his wife Troy, an artist, is even posher. I really think that Dame Ngaio would have been more comfortable with an earlier period and her writing, particularly the dialogue, hasn't really moved with the times.

The rude mechanicals of the piece are the servants at Halberds Manor where the action takes place. Hilary Bill-Tasman, the lord of the manor, has a liking for misunderstood murderers and gets his staff from the nearby high security prison, The Vale, situated on the isolated moorlands. This is partly because Hilary is a do-gooder and partly because they come cheap and are willing to work at such a remote location.

It is the night before Christmas and the guests are all gathered at Halberds on the invitation of Hilary. The house is cosy, but the moors are wild and snow is beginning to fall. One of the guests is artist Troy who has been finishing off a portrait of Hilary. Her husband, Superintendent Alleyn, has been working abroad. The company are waited upon by a motley group of ex-cons including a poisoner, a booby trap specialist and a strangler-turned-religious maniac. But then one of the guests brings his own manservant with him. Alfred Moult is old school and disapproves of having ex-cons as servants in an elegant country house. He puts everyone's back up and duly disappears without trace on Christmas Eve.

The local constabulary are called in to find him and aren't up to the task. Inevitably, Roderick Alleyn is brought in to take charge and show all and sundry how things should be done to enable the guests to settle down to the Boxing Day leftovers.

Tied up in Tinsel is a 50th anniversary edition first published by Collins Crime Club for Christmas 1972 and I loved seeing those small hardbacks on my mum and dad's single bookcase. This is one of Dame Ngaio Marsh’s later mysteries – she was in her mid-70s when this story first appeared – and it seems very dated and something of a curiosity. It feels as though it should be set in the 1930s and if that was the case then it could happily be read as a period piece. But the 1970s? I don't think so. Anyone who actually lived through the 1960s and 1970s will feel that they've stepped through a time warp into an altogether different era.