Descripcion del libro:
**Death and the dancing footman**: Ngaio Marsh was educated in New Zealand, where she went to an art school for five years. Next she joined a repertory company. Her experience in both these fields has come in useful in her novels, so has her knowledge of house decorating, for which she started a business when she came to England. During a wet week-end over twenty years ago, she read what was almost the first contemporary crime story to come her way. Until then, Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins, and Austin Freeman had been the sole authors of her escape literature. After reading thisstory - she fancies it was an early Christie - it seemed to her that she might venture to have a shot at something in the same vein. As a kind of hobby and with no real hope of publication she wrote her first novel. A Man Lay Dead, scribbling it down with a lead pencil in twopenny exercise books. On returning to New Zealand, she left this story with an agent, and was astonished to learn, some six months later, that a publisher had been found. It has been followed by seventeen other detective stories which have been written in between theatrical productions.
In 1948 Ngaio Marsh was swarded an O. B. E. for 'services in connexion with drama and literature in New Zealand.'She now divides her time between the production of plays, long journeys in small sea-going freighters, and the writing of further crime stories.
