Black as He’s Painted
Ngaio Marsh
221 pages
published in 1974
If my girlfriend hadn’t insisted on me reading a passage of this, I would’ve never have read Black as He’s Painted, or any other Ngaio Marsh novel for that matter. My mum, a big fan of the British cozy detective genre, used to read a lot of Ngaio Marsh, but while I did dip into her Agatha Christie collection I never felt the urge to sample the Ngaios. Until I read the passage in question that is. You see, as so many other bookworms, I’m a sucker for cats and fictional threatments of cats; there’s after all nothing as cozy as curling up on the couch with a cat and a book. And Ngaoi Marsh managed to sketch such a convincing and sweet portrait of a cat in the paragraph I was “forced” to read that I immediately wanted to read more.
What had grabbed my attention was the opening of the story. Somewhat unhappily retired ex-Foreign Office civil servant Samuel Whipplestone is going out for a morning constitutional, when he encounters a little cat almost run over by a car. “In a flash it gave a great spring and was on Mr Whipplestone’s chest, clinging with its small paws and –incredibly– purring. He had been told a dying cat willsometimes purr. It had blue eyes. The tip of its tail for about two inches was snow white but the rest of its person was perfectly black. He had no particular antipathy against cats.” That’s so charmingly written and nicely observed I couldn’t help but read the rest of the book when I was home with the flu and in need of something light to read.