Roderick Alleyn

Roderick Alleyn
First appearanceA Man Lay Dead
Last appearanceLight Thickens
Created byNgaio Marsh
In-universe information
GenderMale
OccupationPolice detective
NationalityBritish

Roderick Alleyn (pronounced "Allen") is a fictional character who first appeared in 1934.[1] He is the policeman hero of the 32 detective novels of Ngaio Marsh. Marsh and her gentleman detective belong firmly in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, although the last Alleyn novel, Light Thickens, was published in 1982.[2]

Marsh mentions in an introduction[3] that she named her detective Alleyn after the Elizabethan actor Edward Alleyn, founder of Dulwich College, where her father had been a pupil. She started a novel with Alleyn in 1931, after reading a detective story by Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayers on a wet Saturday afternoon in London and wondering if she could write something in the genre. So she bought six exercise books and a pencil at a local stationer and started A Man Lay Dead, involving a Murder Game, which was then popular at English weekend parties.

  1. ^ Marsh, Ngaio (1934). A Man Lay Dead. Great Britain: Collins. ISBN 9780006155911.
  2. ^ Rosemary., Herbert (1 January 2003). Whodunit? : a who's who in crime & mystery writing. Oxford University Press. pp. 6–7. ISBN 0195157613. OCLC 252700230.
  3. ^ The Ngaio Marsh Collection, volume 1 (A Man Lay Dead/ Enter a Murderer/ The Nursing Home Murder), Ngaio Marsh, Harper, 2009