A review of Swing, Brother, Swing by Ngaio Marsh
This, the fifteenth in Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn series, originally published in 1949, weaves together a tale involving a magazine’s agony aunt and an eccentric member of the British aristocracy. Lord Pastern & Bagott, that is one character whom I shall refer to henceforth as Lord Pastern, has throughout his life appalled his family with his new passions, which have ranged from consorting with Yogi to naturism, has taken up with some gusto a love for syncopated music. He cuts a dash on the tympani and has secured a spot in a leading swing band, headed up by the wonderfully named Breezy Bellairs.
He is scheduled to take a guest spot in the band’s forthcoming engagement at the Metronome club and has even composed a special number, Hot Guy, Hot Gunner, to mark the occasion. The number involves a tableau in which the band’s accordionist, Carlos Rivera, is shot using blank bullets which Pastern has prepared and carried off stage on stretcher with a wreath on his chest. What could possibly go wrong?
Meanwhile, Pastern’s stepdaughter, Félicité, known as Fée, is entangled in a love triangle with Rivera and cousin, Edward Manx, and has been seeking advice from the Harmony’s agony aunt, GPF (Guide, Philosopher, Friend), a magazine for which Manx writes. On the night of Pastern’s performance, she has fallen out with Rivera, Manx has assaulted him and wears a white carnation, the identifier of GPF, according to the latest missive she has received. Lady Pastern, appalled by her husband’s latest shenanigans, is persuaded to attend the nightclub and sits stony faced, showing her disapproval.
The gun goes off and Rivera is fatally wounded, but in true Marsh fashion it was not a bullet that kills him but a stiletto attached to part of a parasol owned by Lady Pastern. Was the stiletto fired from Pastern’s gun or was there some legerdemain on the stage once Rivera went down? There were enough people upset by Pastern, including some of the band members who resented his presence on stage, with enough opportunities to effect the substitution of stiletto for bullet.
It proves a tricky case for Alleyn, who was, of course, in the audience, on a table adjacent to the Pastern contingency, to solve with the able assistance of his colleague, Fox. Midway through the book, a darker tone is introduced to the tale, presaged earlier on, when narcotics, a familiar theme in Golden Age detective fiction, rear their head. There are some nifty pieces of misdirection and what initially seemed to be the motivation for Rivera’s murder and the likely motivation eventually prove to be far off target.
Although Alleyn identifies GPF and knows who killed Rivera and how, he is unable to prove it until he and his colleagues hear an unguarded conversation from the other side of a door. Although this wraps up the case, it is a pretty unsatisfactory conclusion to a book that seems to lose its way and becomes a very different mystery from that which it started out as.
Marsh uses a series of letters and telegrams in the first chapter to set the stage for what is an unnecessarily complicated tale. There are some bright spots, though. Her love of all matters theatrical shines through and her characterisation of the lead characters is good. Pastern is painted as an exasperating fool, but lovably engaging. By way of an obiter, we learn that Agatha, Alleyn’s wife, is pregnant and Fox will be his godfather.
It is an entertaining enough book but is far from being one of her best. In the States it goes by the more prosaic title of A Wreath for Rivera.
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