Marsh said that she got the idea of writing a detective story while reading a novel by Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayers. I suspect it was one of Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey novels, for Sayers’s influence is manifest throughout Marsh’s early books. Sayers had developed a formula that soon was used by many other writers. Her cases are solved by Lord Peter Wimsey, an aristocratic amateur sleuth who collects books and who fills his talk with obscure quotations. He is assisted by his man, Bunter, and by Inspector Parker, a competent but unimaginative Scotland Yard official. Other writers who used the bright amateur/stolid professional combination included Miles Burton, Max Afford, Rupert Penny, Margery Allingham, John Dickson Carr, Ianthe Jerrold, and H. C. Bailey. Ngaio Marsh varied the formula, but only slightly. Roderick Alleyn is a professional, but he begins as a literary cousin to Lord Peter. Alleyn is the scion of an old aristocratic family, and his mother, Lady Alleyn, seems almost a clone of Lord Peter’s mother, the Dowager Duchess of Denver. Even in Marsh’s middle-period novels, such as A Wreath for Rivera (1949), Alleyn addresses his assistant, Inspector Fox, in Wimsey-like language: “Fox, my cabbage, my rare edition, my objet d’art, my own especial bit of bijouterie.” Fox himself is not only much like Parker and other Scotland Yard detectives who assist aristocratic sleuths, but he also shares some characteristics with Wimsey’s servant, Bunter. He is especially good at obtaining information below stairs, in the servants’ quarters. And like Wimsey, Alleyn falls in love with a suspect in one of his cases and marries her in a later novel.