Hand in Glove (novel)

Hand in Glove is a detective novel by Ngaio Marsh; it is the twenty-second novel to feature Roderick Alleyn, and was first published in 1962. The story concerns a high-society treasure-hunt party at which a murder takes place.

Plot Synopsis
The elderly Percival Pyke Period shares his country house with Harold Cartell. Period considers himself an expert on etiquette, particularly letters of condolence.

Cartell argues with his stepson Andrew Bantling, whose inheritance he controls until Andrew's twenty-fifth birthday. Andrew wants to resign his army commission and paint professionally; Cartell opposes this.

Several people visit for lunch: Constance Cartell, Harold's unmarried sister; Period's secretary, Nicola Maitland-Mayne; Constance's ward "Moppett" and her boyfriend, Leonard Leiss. Constance is devoted and indulgent to Moppett, but Cartell dislikes her and Leiss. Andrew and his mother, Cartell's ex-wife Désirée, visit briefly; she announces she is throwing a party that evening. Period expounds on his favourite subject ("breeding" and "background"). Constance says that people who overemphasize this are hiding something; Cartell mentions someone he knows who forged his own name in a parish register to establish his ancestry but has never been exposed.

After lunch, Period discovers that Leiss has a criminal record. He notices his antique gold cigarette-case is missing, and suspects Leiss.

Cartell rows with Désirée about Andrew’s inheritance. He confronts Moppett and Leiss about the cigarette-case, threatening to call the police. Then he argues with Constance about her infatuation with Moppett, whom she defends blindly.

During Désirée's party, Period complains bitterly to her about Cartell's annoying habits, but she realises that Cartell has seriously upset him in another way which he won’t disclose.

Next morning, Period's manservant hand-delivers Constance a letter consoling her for her brother's death. Constance rushes over to Period's house to speak to him; Period then receives news that Cartell has been found dead in a ditch local workmen have dug outside his house.

Superintendent Alleyn arrives. Someone tampered with the plank-bridge over the ditch so that it would collapse when stepped on, then levered a concrete sewer-pipe onto Cartell. Alleyn deduces that Cartell must have been walking his dog, which the dead man took out every night. He sees Period's cigarette-case lying in the trench. Alleyn interviews Nicola and Andrew. Attracted to each other, they left the party early and sat in his car near the ditch to talk. They saw Moppett and Leiss loitering nearby; Leiss stooped over the ditch at one point. Alleyn asks Nicola whether Leiss was wearing gloves, and she describes the chamois ones he wore. Later they saw Désirée having a drunken row with Cartell and threatening him.

While Alleyn is visiting Constance, a letter from Period arrives. Reading it, Constance is shocked: it is identical to the letter of condolence for her brother's death he sent her already, "Before they had found him."

Alleyn interrogates Leiss, who denies stealing the cigarette-case. Alleyn takes Leiss’s overcoat and chamois gloves for testing.

He confronts Period with the two letters: Period is evasive, saying he wrote to Constance on a private matter. Alleyn asks if he knew someone else who had lost a brother, and he admits this but won’t identify them. Alleyn notices the family tree displayed on the wall of Period's study.

Alleyn visits Désirée, and asks if she has had a letter from Period recently. Désirée, producing one, suggests it shows that Period has dementia, because it refers to a conversation about his family's antiquity that she doesn't remember. She mentions that her brother died recently: Period has sent his letters to the wrong recipients. Period phones Désirée, distraught, asking her to burn the letter he has accidentally sent her.

Alleyn visits a local church to examine the register. Period's name has been added underneath that of his supposed twin sister, dead in infancy, at a later date. Period has adopted the middle name "Pyke" to make it appear he belongs to a gentry family that has died out; Cartell had discovered this.

Forensics find plenty of traces of Period's tobacco on Leiss's clothes (suggesting he stole the case), but conclude that the person who moved the planks was not wearing Leiss's chamois gloves but heavy driving gloves. Moppett complains to the police that Leiss’s driving gloves are missing.

Alleyn gets a call from Period, saying he has something to disclose; Period is then knocked out by an intruder. Alleyn finds him unconscious. When he comes to, he rambles about hearing Leiss's favourite pop song being whistled outside his window on the night of the murder.

Alleyn feels that if Leiss or Moppett had committed the murder they would not have advertised their presence in the lane by whistling, or that Désirée would have done the same by shouting. Leiss's missing gloves are recovered and a bloodstain on them matches a wound on Constance's hand. She has killed her brother, and attempted to kill Period, to protect Moppett from a possible jail sentence. Constance breaks down when presented with the evidence.

Composition
Marsh wrote much of the book on a cruise across the Pacific in 1960. As she worked on it, she found it becoming "a kind of comedy of manners with very little crime". She later confessed that Percival Pyke Period was among her own favourites of the characters she had written.

Reception
Anthony Boucher, reviewing in The New York Times, felt that though "highly readable and entertaining" the novel was not Marsh's best: "The genteel dissection of levels of snobbery in the English country gentry is, to me at least, less interesting than her usual themes, and Superintendent Roderick Alleyn has handled more cleanly defined murder puzzles. But even minor Marsh is an evening of perfectly polished professionalism."

Jacques Barzun was likewise disappointed, calling the book "pleasant enough; there is clarity and humor; but the people and the props are a bit tired, especially Roderick Alleyn, who may be said to mumble his way from clue to clue around the countryside".

British reviewers were more positive. Julian Symons in The Sunday Times called Hand in Glove "neat, dexterous... Miss Marsh's freshest and most enjoyable performance for years". In a capsule review for The Sunday Telegraph, Cecil Day-Lewis under his crime-fiction pseudonym "Nicholas Blake" summed the book up as "Clever and cosy." Francis Iles in The Guardian called it "Light, entertaining and disastrously readable: that is, if you have anything else you ought to be doing", praising the "easy, natural dialogue and gentle humour".

Like Boucher, Marsh scholar Kathryne Slate McDorman sees snobbery and class distinctions as a major theme of the book, noting that even Period's servants are particularly conservative.

Recordings and Adaptations
In 1987, Jeremy Sinden recorded an audiobook of the novel for Chivers Audio. BBC One broadcast an adaptation for the television series The Inspector Alleyn Mysteries, with John Gielgud guest-starring, on 11 January 1994.