Roderick Alleyn
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Roderick Alleyn is a fictional character: the hero and detective from Ngaio Marsh's novels.
A "gentleman policeman", in a style later used by P. D. James for her detective Adam Dalgliesh, he is a senior figure in the CID.
In earlier novels, he is single, later meeting and marrying Agatha Troy, a famous oil-painter, and having one son who also features in at least one novel.
Marsh mentions in an introduction that she named him Alleyn after Alleyn's School, where her father had been a pupil.
Several of the novels were adapted for television in the 1990's. Allyen was played by Simon Williams in the first story, Artists in Crime, and then by Patrick Malahide in eight more tales.