YMMV / Ngaio Marsh

• Market-Based Title: Several of the novels were renamed for the American market. Sometimes the reasoning behind the changes isn't apparent.
  • A Surfeit of Lampreys, which was a play on the surname of a family at the center of the case, was retitled Death of a Peer, which was also accurate, since the central crime of the tale was the murder of the head of the family, who was a marquis.
  • Swing Brother Swing became A Wreath for Rivera, perhaps over the central word "Brother"?
  • Opening Night was renamed Night at the Vulcan, possibly because so many of her works were set in theatres, making the original title too general.
  • Off With His Head became Death of a Fool.
  • Death at the Dolphin became Killer Dolphin, scrapping alliteration for a more active word "Killer".
  • Curiously, the idiomatic title Black as He's Painted wasn't changed for the U.S. market, though the expression is more British than American.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Even the purest young girls smoke like chimneys. Hell, everyone smokes like chimneys.
  • Averted and played straight in Opening Night. On one hand, an actress is raped by her husband; all consider it rape, something the average person wouldn't have done in that time period. On the other hand, the love story involves a 20-year-old woman and a 45-year-old man who, it is revealed later, is her distant cousin. (They share a remarkable resemblance despite their distant relationship, so much so that she's hired to play his daughter.)
  • The overt homophobia of some of her novels, especially Death in Ecstasy and Singing in the Shrouds.
  • While many modern readers will agree with Marsh's criticisms of Dorothy Sayers' racist and classist beliefs, the way Marsh regularly characterises Sayers (both in fiction as thinly veiled caricatures and in various introductions and articles) as a generic sex-hating old prude seem both sexist and oddly off the mark — even without knowing then-private details of Sayers' life (such as her having a son out of wedlock with a married man — in fairness to Sayers, she didn't know he was married), the Wimsey books are neither intensely religious (Wimsey himself is an atheist) nor particularly anti-sex. The idea of mocking a woman's (real or imagined) sex life as a form of critique can feel very out of step for modern readers, particularly as Marsh is seen as the most progressive of the Big Four.