Artists in Crime

By Ngaio Marsh

The setting is 1930s Britain. Inspector Alleyn is on his way home from the Far East when he meets a talented female artist. He admires her work, she is not receptive.
Back home in Britain, he is called to investigate a murder at a country estate that just happens to be the home of the standoffish artist, Agatha Troy.
Miss Troy is running an artist colony out of her home and several artists are working together on their projects. The current project is a nude study featuring a young woman model. This woman is the victim  that has sent Alleyn to the scene. She was stabbed to death while posing for the artists, by means of an unlikely trap.
So Alleyn has to interview this collection of free spirits and try to determine which one of them had it in for the dead woman. It turms out the woman was a blackmailer with multiple victims among the group. Alleyn has to figure out who had enough and decided to finish her off to shut her mouth. But first he has to get past the red herring set up to point the police in the wrong direction. And keep his mind on his work while falling for the aloof and elusive Agatha Troy.

This was an okay read. I did find the police interviews with the suspects rather dull after a bit. And I wasn't surprised when the main suspect turned up dead. But the identity of the real killer came as a bit of a surprise, although a person cleverer than me probably saw the clues right away.

I do have a quibble with the story. One of the plot details features aspirin. The story implies that taking aspirin is similar to taking a sleeping pill. Now, I don't know about the aspirin they had in Britain in the 1930s, but aspirin here in the States is merely a pain reliever and does not induce sleep.
My copy of the book was published in 1980, but the original novel dates from the 1930s. I am wondering if the author used some other pain reliever common in Britain with the soporific side effect mentioned in the story and the publishers here changed it to aspirin, which would be more familiar to an American audience. Because it is hard to believe that a woman as smart as Ngaio Marsh would make such an obvious mistake about the effects of aspirin.