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“... Of the four Queens of Crime who dominated the 1930s – Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy L. Sayers – Ngaio Marsh reigns supreme for excellence of style and characterisation,’ writes Margaret Lewis in her introduction. The proposition could be contested; it could be maintained that Christie is more ingenious, Allingham more lively and Sayers has more intellectual weight ...”

“... unwise) sit comfortably, invitingly on our shelves, demanding periodic rereading. The list of Ngaio Marsh’s works at the beginning of Photo-Finish omits several books published in the mid-Thirties, which are still in print and are far from shame-making. Miss Marsh must by now have written something like thirty ...”

“... I’ve read a huge number of these novels over the years, so when I was asked to write about Ngaio Marsh I blithely agreed, not realising that I’d never actually read any of her books. I was convinced I had, but it soon turned out I’d only read part of one when I was 12 or 13; I’d merely registered some of the titles on the spines of the green ...”

“... criticism of Austen. James has talked of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh as ‘historians of their age’, meaning that they can often capture society as it is with more accuracy than people writing in less workaday genres. So she has Lizzy dealing with Mrs Reynolds, who helps her keep house, Thomas Bidwell, who ...”

“... of ‘golden age’ detective novelists. Three of them – Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Ngaio Marsh – come before members of Professor Benstock’s syndicate. Bibliographically, the results are useful: critically, they’re not. All are pleasant to read, like souvenir brochures; but all rely too much on remembered responses, wallowing in the ...”

“... writers.’ He’s specifically referring to crime novelists – the likes of Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie – in an attempt to wrest the detective story away from the English suburbs and towards the grittier (and far more romantic) novels written by himself and Dashiell Hammett. An explanation of sorts had already ...”

“... that bolstered the interwar ‘golden age’ of crime writing, ruled over by Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and Agatha Christie, or the postwar Ealing comedies, best represented by Dennis Price in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949): ‘It is so difficult to make a neat job of killing people with whom one is not on friendly ...”

“... very good stories by long-languishing authors. Alongside, if not quite equal to, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy Sayers and Josephine Tey, we now have Anna Katharine Green, C.L. Pirkis, Mary Wilkins and Lucy Moberly. It seems a shame now that so many of the authors of female detective stories felt obliged to provide sentimental endings, to make ...”

“... about the house – we never quite got round to bookshelves – there were a couple of titles by Ngaio Marsh, a batch of paperbacks by Dennis Wheatley and Ian Fleming and an incomplete, untouched set of Dickens in pale blue cloth bindings. Nobody went near the Dickens – Colin, a reader of contemporary paperbacks only, declared a hatred of him for his ...”