Overture to Death

Overture to Death
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A classic Ngaio Marsh novel in which she more than lives up to her reputation as a crime writer of intelligence and style.It was planned as an act of charity: a new piano for the parish hall, an amusing play to finance the gift.But its execution was doomed when Miss Campanula sat down to play. A chord was struck, a shot rang out and Miss Campanula was dead.A case of sinister infatuation for the brilliant Chief Detective-Inspector Alleyn.

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NGAIO MARSH

Overture to Death


This novel is a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Harper

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2009

Overture to Death first published in Great Britain by Geoffrey Bles 1939

Ngaio Marsh asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of these works

Copyright © Ngaio Marsh Ltd 1939

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780006512585

Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2009 ISBN: 9780007344468 Version: 2016-09-12

For the Sunday Morning Party:

G. M. LESTER

DUNDAS AND CECIL WALKER NORMAN AND MILES STACPOOLE BATCHELOR & My Father

Jocelyn Jernigham Of Pen Cuckoo
Henry Jernigham His son
Eleanor Prentice His cousin
Taylor His butler
Walter Copeland, B.A. OXON. Rector of Winton St Giles
Dinah Copeland His daughter
Idris Campanula Of the Red House, Chipping
Dr William Templett Of Chippingwood
Selia Ross Of Duck Cottage, Cloudyfold
Superintendent Blandish Of the Great Chipping Constabulary
Sergeant Roper Of the Great Chipping Constabulary
Mrs Biggins
Georgie Biggins Her son
Gibson Miss Campanula’s Chauffeur
Gladys Wright Of the Y.P.F.C.
Saul Tranter Poacher
Chief Detective-Inspector Of the Criminal
Alleyn Investigation Department
Detective-Inspector Fox His assistant
Detective-Sergeant Bailey His finger print expert
Detective-Sergeant Thompson His camera expert
Nigel Bathgate Journalist, his Watson

Jocelyn Jernigham was a good name. The seventh Jocelyn thought so as he stood at his study window and looked down the vale of Pen Cuckoo toward that precise spot where the spire of Salisbury Cathedral could be seen through field-glasses on a clear day.

‘Here I stand,’ he said without turning his head, ‘and here my forebears have stood, generation after generation, and looked over their own tilth and tillage. Seven Jocelyn Jernighams.’

‘I’m never quite sure,’ said his son Henry Jocelyn, ‘what tilth and tillage are. What precisely, Father, is tilth?’

‘There’s no feeling for that sort of thing,’ said Jocelyn, angrily, ‘among the present generation. Cheap sneers and clever talk that mean nothing.’

‘But I assure you I like words to mean something. That is why I ask you to define a tilth. And you say, “the present generation.” You mean my generation, don’t you? But I’m twenty-three. There is a newer generation than mine. If I marry Dinah –’

‘You quibble deliberately in order to lead our conversation back to this absurd suggestion. If I had known –’

Henry uttered an impatient noise and moved away from the fireplace. He joined his father in the window and he too looked down into the darkling vale of Pen Cuckoo. He saw an austere landscape, adamant beneath drifts of winter mist. The naked trees slept soundly, the fields were dumb with cold; the few stone cottages, with their comfortable signals of blue smoke, were the only waking things in all the valley.



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