It has become more and more elaborate and the unknotting of clues has never been one of my talents.” Some current writers who share Marsh’s difficulties in handling clues have solved the problem by ignoring clues altogether. It says much for Marsh’s adherence to the form that she was willing to struggle with clueing, and she produced books as well structured and as fair to the reader as any of the Golden Age.

Much has been made of the influence of the stage on Marsh’s detective stories. Many of her novels are centered on a theatrical company, including Enter a Murderer (1935), Vintage Murder (1937), Night at the Vulcan (1951), Killer Dolphin (1966), and Light Thickens (1982); and some of her nontheatrical novels, such as Death at the Bar (1940), feature actors as major characters. More significantly, Marsh sets a scene much in the way of a playwright. In the interviews that play so large a part in Alleyn’s investigations, she clearly visualizes where each character is standing or sitting in relation to the props—the furniture and other objects in the room. Her painter’s eye is also involved, for she describes the setting vividly yet without making it more than the backdrop for the people. Some scholars go even further. LeRoy Panek, in Watteau’s Shepherds, The Detective Novel in Britain (1979), analyzes the structure of her novels according to the Aristotelian rules for Greek drama. If this is going too far, there is no denying that she creates her stories with a feeling for dramatic interest, for placing of the climax, and for directing her characters in a way that is more the style of a playwright than a novelist. Although there are exceptions, we learn about Marsh’s characters not by what they tell us of themselves— the soliloquy had gone out of fashion by the time that Marsh began to write—but by how they relate to one another. In short, Marsh treats the reader as though he or she were a part of an audience at a play.