I’m onto Ngaio Marsh (after completing Agatha Christie), thanks to you.  Thank you so much.  I enjoyed the adaptation as well, and sadly binged not know there were only two seasons.  🌻🌻

I love it when I'm watching something I love, and I've forgotten who the murderer is!

So... I have some thoughts, as usual. Spoiler asterisks ahoy!
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I think I partially agree with your take. For me, the start of the novel was incredibly intriguing. Seeing this disadvantaged outsider try and find her way into this world is quite fascinating. Seeing the little character clashes, the behind-the-scenes stuff, the little details that added authenticity... love it. Love it love it love it. I thought the pacing worked beautifully, and I definitely agree with your thoughts on Martyn. Definitely one of Marsh's most sympathetic and fleshed-out heroines. She's great. At the start.

Then the murder happens, and the book's quality immediately falls off a cliff.

This is a murder mystery where there's no narrative reason for the murder to happen. It doesn't feel linked in any way to the story we've been enjoying up until now. Nor does it feel thematically linked to it - in fact, I'm not even sure what the murder is supposed to add in terms of "theme". Some guy stole some other guy's work and then killed the person who was blackmailing him about it... so what? What does this add, except the stockiest of stock motives? The "investigation parts", as you put it, drag on to the point where it felt, to me, like the novel had just stopped in its tracks. I don't care about any of this because it has absolutely nothing to do with the story I'd been enjoying up until that point.

I wish Marsh had just scrapped the murder entirely and written this as a straightforward novel about a dysfunctional theatre full of big personalities, trying to put on a show together. That was the story I was invested in. Not this incredibly dry and boring investigation sequence where it feels as though we're going on endlessly about minutiae regarding alibis and mechanics. I've never felt Alleyn was a particularly strong character when compared to many of the detectives of his time, but this is him at his worst. He's got absolutely no reason to be here, yet his investigation suddenly becomes the focus of the story. I always felt that Christie, Carr, Stout and Crispin always did a great job of organically inserting their regular detective characters into the story. I guess this is the advantage of having your detectives not be police officers.

Guessed the murderer before the murder actually happened by the way. Not in any smart logical way. More in a kind of "Well, if you were going to have one of these characters be the secret killer, it'd probably be X" type of deal; and then it was. So... not much mystery here either. The issue wasn't that I wasn't surprised by the reveal. It was that I didn't CARE about the reveal. At that point you could've said any one of these characters was the killer, and my response would be "Yeah... and?"

In summary: it's weird to say this is one of Marsh's worst when the start of the book is SO good; but to go back to the cliff metaphor I used earlier, if you start on the highest plateau possible, you have a lot further to fall. And this one falls hard, hitting the ground with an underwhelming "splat" and breaking most of its bones on impact.

Fabulous, thanx

It's possible it wasn't in your version, but when Martyn arrives at the theater one of the women who'd auditioned tells her she looks faint and basically forces her to drain a bottle of...cognac, I think. I realize people drank brandy to "fortify" themselves after a shock, but forcing a young woman who'd just traveled to the other side of the planet and hadn't had a decent meal in days/weeks to down a bottle of booze seems bizarre even for the time. It also occurred to me that if this were a contemporary mystery, this would be our first clue that Martyn is an unreliable narrator since she's already imbibing.

A tarn is a mountain lake, so Martyn Tarne might be a lazily disguised pun? I like the name, but it can't compete with Gay Gainsford.

Given her history in the theater, I wonder if Dr. Rutherford was inspired by one of Marsh's peers or the negative opinions of her produced from any actors she had a difficult time directing.

I'll echo one of the other commenters and note that the murder mystery feels tacked onto a much more engrossing story of a theater production.

One of my favourites among Marsh's works. As you say, the character work is very strong.

At 18:22 you suggest that Michael Lamprey was originally from NZ. That's not the case. The Lampreys were English. Their stint at Deepacres station in NZ was an attempt to dodge their creditors and reduce their living expenses.

I have a cheap Fontana edition from the early 1960s. Irritatingly, the small amount of German text is mangled or misspelt.

I wish there were more Marsh adaptations -- not everything has to be Christie, much as I adore her.

I've read this recently (so that I could watch the video without getting spoiled :)) and loved everything up to the murder, but after the murder things got really boring and the solution was disappointing - it felt completely separate from most of the characterization we got and the drama in the theater.

The homophobia and racism in Ngaio Marsh has really dated badly. Her gay, gay-coded and black characters are always lurid stereotypes. I still enjoy her books but a lot of them come with major eyerolls.