Who created the fictional detective Roderick Alleyn?
Roderick Alleyn Roderick Alleyn Roderick Alleyn is a fictional character who first appeared in 1934. He is the policeman hero of the 32 detective novels of Ngaio Marsh. Marsh and her gentleman detective belongs firmly in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, although the last Alleyn novel, "Light Thickens", was published in 1982. Marsh mentions in an introduction 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
Roderick Alleyn 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. Roderick Alleyn (pronounced 'Allen') is a gentleman detective, whose family and educational background may be deduced from comments in the novels. In brief, Alleyn was apparently born around 1892-1894, graduated from Oxford around 1915, served in the army for three years in World War I, then spent a year (1919–1920) in the British