Quotes from Ngaio Marsh

The coroner summed up at considerably length and with commendable simplicity. His manner suggested that the jury as a whole was certifiable as mentally unsound, but that he knew his duty and would perform it in the teeth of stupidity.

My good Harper, I have no notion. Fortunately I was becalmed near a garage. The fellow thrust his head among her smoking entrails, uttered some mumbojumbo, performed suitable rites with oil and water, and I was able to continue

If you're going to ask me to provide myself with three nice little alibis," said Hersey, "you may as well know straight away that I can't do it. I seem to remember reading somewhere that that makes me innocent and I'm sure I hope it's true" "It's in the best tradition of detective fiction, I understand," said Allyen with a smile.

where curiosity could be assuaged, prestige maintained, and personal responsibility dissolved. With

clock in a jeweller's window gave the time as twenty-three minutes to five. She knew, by the consequential scurry of its second-hand, that it was alive. It was surrounded by other clocks that made mad dead statements of divergent times as if, she thought, to set before her the stages of that day's fruitless pilgrimage.

For some reason that he had never been able to understand, Mandrake was a man in whom his fellow-creatures confided. He was by no means obviously sympathetic and he seldom asked for confidences but, perhaps because of these very omissions, they came his way.

Nash, who carried in his head a sort of social ladder, had quietly decided that police officers of all ranks were to be graded with piano tuners.

Honestly, Jonathan, I begin to think you are suffering from some terrible form of insanity the idée fixe. People may drown in your ornamental waters or perish in your snow-drifts, and all you can think of is your hell-inspired party.

Fox, in many ways ours is a degrading job-of-work. Custom makes monsters of us all. Do you ever feel like that about it, Fox? No, I don't think you do. You are too nice-minded.

The merciless scent of flowers was so heavy here that it hung like mist on the cold air. The room was crowded with flowers. In the centre, on three shrouded trestles, Robert Gospell's body lay in its coffin.

I quite appreciate your scruples, but they are not worth much when they are used to screen a murderer or to cast suspicion on an innocent person.

Is it Locke who says that it is one thing to show a man he is in error and another to convince him of the truth? You have shown me my error. Pray reveal the whole truth.

By shifting his gaze slightly, he saw frame in the sitting room window, a landscape aloof from man. Its beauty was perfectly articulate yet utterly remote. Against his will he was moved by it as an unmusical listener may be profoundly disturbed by sound forms that he is unable to comprehend.

I do not imagine; detectives aren't allowed to imagine. They note probabilities. I

Desirée wore black for her April Fool's party. On any other woman of her age it would have been a disastrous dress but, by virtue of a sort of inner effrontery, she got away with it. Her neck, her bosom and that dismal little region, known, prettily, as the armpit, were all so many statements of betrayal, but she triumphed over them and not so much took them in her own stride as obliged other people to take them in theirs.

In our midst—in our very midst, Matron—are secret agents, secret societies, powers of evil known to the Yard but unsuspected by the general public. Mercifully so." He stopped short, folded his arms, and wondered how much of this the woman would swallow. Apparently the whole dose.

Human nature being what it is, sometimes the company of other people is all the irritant required to form a pearl of revelation

I become facetious when perplexed. Right now I am perplex'd in the extreme.

Before he had completed this thought, the peak of the mountain was flooded with thin rose colour, too austere to be theatrical, but so vivid that its beauty was painful. He felt that kind of impatience and disquietude that sudden beauty brings. He could not stand and watch the flood of warmth flow down the flanks of the mountain nor the intolerable transfiguration of the sky.

The Romans say, 'You must', the Protestant Nonconformists say, 'You must not', the Catholic Church of England says, 'You may.' [regarding the practice of confession; Overture to Death, chapter 17]

Every sleuth ought to have a tame half-wit, to make him feel clever.

You fatuous old bag of tripe!

Hospodi bozhe moy!