Death and the Dancing Footman

Death and the Dancing Footman is a detective novel by Ngaio Marsh, the eleventh of her Roderick Alleyn books and was first published in 1941 in the US by Little Brown of Boston and in 1942 in the UK by Collins Crime Club. It was written in New Zealand, but set in a Dorset, England country house.

The novel received good reviews from The New York Times, and Britain's The Observer and The Tatler. It was hailed by the New Zealand Listener as "Miss Marsh's favourite among her own books".

Plot summary
It is 1940. We meet wealthy dilettante Jonathan Royal of Highfold Manor, Cloudyfold, Dorset, gleefully outlining to the poetic dramatist Aubrey Mandrake his plan to host a house party of guests whose mutual animosity is sure to provide a cruelly macabre entertainment. Among them are: an Austrian surgeon; the society woman on whom, twenty years earlier, he performed a facelift that has disfigured her for life; her two adult sons, bitter rivals in love and for their mother's affections; the fiancée of one brother who still nurtures feelings for the other brother who jilted her; and two equally bitter business rivals in the beauty industry.

The two business rivals discuss Pirandello's play Six Characters in Search of an Author, which is an absurdist metatheatric play about the relationship among authors, their characters, and theatre practitioners.

Soon after the guests are gathered, Highfold Manor is cut off by a snowstorm with the phone line down, although the house still has electric power, possibly from a private generator. The murderous blow is delivered to with a Maori greenstone mere weapon.

Inspector Roderick Alleyn is called in, as he and his wife, the painter Agatha Troy, are staying nearby with the Copelands. Alleyn stages a re-enactment with the suspects.

The solution rests around the wireless. There is an amusingly original feature in a key witness, the footman who has lingered in the hall to listen to the radio playing. He surreptitiously attempt the steps of the novelty dance band hit Hands, Knees and Boomps-a-Daisy.

The killer is identified as

Reception
Kay Irvin, writing in The New York Times, was impressed with this novel by Marsh, noting the diverse personalities and the clever plot. She closed by saying "the interest of character is brilliant and unflagging, and both incident and conversation are alive with wit."

Aubrey Mandrake says that Royal has invited stark murder to his home.

Development
The play Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello deeply impressed Ngaio Marsh. She herself later directed it with great success.

Allusions to real weapons
The weapon chosen is derived from Marsh's New Zealand nationality and background, and classically typical of the Golden Age Whodunnit's devotion to arcane weaponry.

Similarity of plot to other authors
The novel's host and broad plot concept bear a kinship to Agatha Christie's 1936 novel Cards on the Table, although the treatment, characters and specific plot are entirely different and original.

Adaptations
The BBC made a 90-minute adaptation, starring Nigel Graham and dramatised by Alan Downer, in 1986.