The Body in the Library Is Never Our Own
Ian Patterson: On Ngaio Marsh, 5 November 2020
“... in innate wickedness works better than vague talk about inheritance or exposure.The poet C. Day Lewis, in his guise as Nicholas Blake, once said that writing detective stories was a harmless release of a spring of cruelty innate in everyone. One reason for seeing the genre as a form of comedy is its insistence that harmlessness, cruelty and comic detachment ... ”