In the Golden Age of British crime fiction in the 1920s and 1930s, the names of four women were so dominant that they became known as the “Queens of Crime.” They were Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh—though, for my money, Marsh was the best of them.
The great crime writer Dorothy B. Hughes once called her “a writer’s writer.” She meant that, while in the 32 novels Marsh wrote between 1934 and 1982, she could construct puzzle plots with the best of them, it was her prose that really made her stand out. It was clear, subtle, ironic, unsentimental, but always elegant and frequently witty; her characters were sharply, sometimes hilariously, drawn; her settings were marvelously described; and her knowledge and erudition, while lightly worn, were both broad and deep.
All of this was accomplished sometimes with just a few words. Witness this character in Vintage Murder (1937): “A stock comedian, a funny man with a funny face, and unless I am much mistaken, a mean disposition.” Or these two supporting characters in Artists in Crime (1938): Valmai Seacliff, “thin, blonde, and very, very pretty. She was the type that certain modern novelists write about with an enthusiasm which they attempt to disguise as satirical detachment;” and diamond-in-the-rough artist Walt Hatchett, “He was short, with the general appearance of a bad man in a South American movie. His hair resembled a patent-leather cap…he walked with a sort of hard-boiled slouch, and his clothes fitted him rather too sleekly. A cigarette seemed to be perpetually gummed to his under-lip, which projected. He had beautiful hands.”
Marsh’s hero, Roderick Alleyn, a detective-inspector who rises through the ranks as the books proceed, can be seen as a transitional figure in British detective fiction. You could draw a straight line from Sayers’s aristocratic amateur Lord Peter Wimsey to Marsh’s well-born but down-to-earth Alleyn to P.D. James’s cerebral poet-policeman Adam Dalgleish. Alleyn is at once authoritative and self-deprecating, an unpretentious man destined for the diplomatic service who broke with all class convention when he joined Scotland Yard instead. There, he is a thorough professional, a keen proponent of the slow amassment of facts and the fitting-in of each little piece of evidence. He observes and listens, tracing opportunity and pattern, and constantly warns about the “hateful realm of surmise and conjecture” (Hand in Glove, 1962): “When you find a cop guessing, you kick him in the pants” (Death of a Fool, 1957).
His job has made him naturally skeptical, and he is acutely aware of “the squalor, boredom, horror, and cynicism of a policeman’s lot” (Last Ditch, 1977), but he has not lost his compassion, nor his sense of humanity. Of the latter, he lectures a police class in Clutch of Constables (1968), “If you lose it altogether, you’ll be, in my opinion, better out of the force, because you’ll have lost your sense of values and that’s a dire thing to befall any policeman.”
He also broke with convention when he met, wooed, and married the very independent-minded artist Agatha Troy, a process which Marsh dispatched over the course of only four books: Artists in Crime, where they meet and she regards him with spiky wariness; Death in a White Tie (1938), where Alleyn wins her over; Overture to Death (1939), where wedding plans seem in the offing; and Death at the Bar (1940), where—well, they’re already married. No need to wallow in the nuptials—back to business.
“My London agent, I remember, was a bit dubious about marrying Alleyn off,” Marsh recalled. “There is a school of thought that considers love-interest, where the investigating character is involved, should be kept off-stage or at least handled in a rather gingerly fashion.” But there was more than a little bit of autobiography in the strong-minded Troy, who shared many of Marsh’s own views about art and society (her repugnance for capital punishment, for instance), and whom she deemed a good match for Alleyn.
“Troy and Alleyn suit each other,” she said. “Neither impinges upon the other’s work without being asked, with the result that in Troy’s case, she does ask pretty often, sometimes gets argumentative and up-tight over the answers, and almost always ends up by following the suggestion. She misses Alleyn very much when they are separated. I like Troy. When I am writing about her, I can see her with her shortish dark hair, thin face and hands. She’s absent-minded, shy and funny, and she can paint like nobody’s business.”
Of the books themselves, Marsh said, “I have always tried to keep the settings as far as possible within the confines of my own experience.” This mean that they mostly took place in England and Marsh’s native New Zealand (though the latter numbered only four books), and that the subjects often had to do with painting or the theatre, both of which Marsh knew intimately. The rest she supplemented with a great deal of research. She took pride in amassing a considerable reference library of her own and in traveling with Scotland Yard detectives to crime scenes—the same held true of the New York Police Department when she visited New York in 1960. She didn’t want to make what she called “bloomers.”
That doesn’t mean that she didn’t like to get inventive. Her methods of murder were often very imaginative, such as victims found in a bale of wool (Died in the Wool, 1945) lured into a pool of boiling mud (Colour Scheme, 1943), skewered through the eye (Death of a Peer, 1941), stabbed with a needle inserted into an umbrella handle in a nightclub filled with people, including Alleyn and Troy (A Wreath for Rivera, 1949) and shot when the unfortunate target steps on the soft pedal of a piano rigged with a gun during a performance of Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C Sharp Minor (Overture to Death).
You might well assume that all of this indicates that Ngaio Marsh herself was a pretty interesting person, and in that, you would be right.
First, there’s the matter of her birthdate. She was born in 1895, but her parents didn’t bother to register her birth for five years, and, according to one report, by the time they did, they’d forgotten the actual date, so Marsh elected to celebrate it on April 23rd, the birthdate of William Shakespeare.
Then, there’s her name. She was born Edith Ngaio Marsh, but of course no one knew her as Edith. “Ngaio” is a Maori word (pronounced “nye-o”), and it had a number of meanings and connotations—clever, expert, deliberate, thorough, restless, a kind of little bug, a kind of evergreen tree. “I don’t know which my parents had in mind,” she said, but a lot of those meanings turned out to apply.
Then there was her appearance, which was very striking. She cut an imposing, dignified, and sometimes intimidating figure—tall (5’ 10”), thin, mannish, gawky, deep-voiced, dressed “usually in beautifully cut slacks,” said one observer, and possessed of “large feet with shoes like canal boats.” She never married, never had children, had close companionships with women, and so the speculation of the time inevitably turned to the question of her sexual preferences. She flatly denied that she was a lesbian (some thought she was simply asexual), but would say no more about it, which was in keeping with her deep reticence about revealing any of her personal life. She was an intensely private person, and even her autobiography, Black Beech and Honeydew, was scant in personal details, both in the 1965 original and a revised version in 1981. Towards the end of her life, she began systematically destroying her papers, giving her housekeeper piles of documents—letters, notes, handwritten manuscripts, and photographs—to take down to the incinerator and burn. She wanted to control her own story. According to one commentator who met and interviewed her, he thought Marsh just wanted the freedom of being who she was in a world, especially in a New Zealand that was still very conformist in its judgments of what constituted “decent jokers, good Sheilas, and ‘weirdos.’”
Her love of painting and the theatre both began when she was young. In 1909, she enrolled part-time in the Canterbury School of Art, and then full-time from 1914 to 1919, and she was very successful there, winning scholarships and several prizes, and going on to exhibit many times with a peer group of like-minded artists, mostly women, called “The Group.” Ultimately, she decided she wasn’t quite good enough—“I acquired quite a bit of technical skill and got quite a long way with my painting, but I never felt I was doing what New Zealand was about with my paint.” Nevertheless, her books are full of artists, not least of which, of course, is Agatha Troy herself, and her prose is full of wonderful painterly touches.
Besides, theatre held an even greater attraction for her. Her mother was an actress, and her father, though a bank clerk, participated enthusiastically in amateur theatricals. Marsh went to many plays with them, and at school wrote and performed in her own plays, including one, The Moon Princess, which got praise in the local press. In 1916, the Allan Wilkie Theatre Company visited New Zealand, and their Hamlet so excited her that she wrote a melodrama called The Medallion, which her mother urged her to show Mr. Wilkie. The play “must have been bad in a slightly promising way,” for Wilkie invited her to join the company as an actor for the rest of the New Zealand tour. She fell in love with it, joined another company after that tour ended, and then joined a local drama school as a tutor, and started producing traveling vaudeville shows and large-scale fund-raising shows. This blossomed further and she became a major theatrical force, both in New Zealand and London, between which she traveled for the rest of her life. Shakespeare, Pirandello, Chekhov—her work as a director and producer was admired everywhere, and she became a huge influence in New Zealand, not only for the productions themselves, but for the young acting and directing talent she nourished.
In fact, in New Zealand, she was honored more for that work than for her novels. There was a strain of snobbishness in the New Zealand literary establishment that looked down on “popular culture,” proclaiming her books to be lightweight and not real literature (an attitude, alas, with which crime fans are all too familiar). It frustrated her enough to comment in her autobiography, “Whenever I return to New Zealand, I am always asked to write articles saying what I think about it, and even, on exceptional occasions, what I think about William Shakespeare, but seldom what I think about crime stories…Intellectual New Zealand friends tactfully avoid all mention of any published work, and if they like me, do so, I cannot but feel, in spite of it.”
Marsh herself, though, always enthusiastically championed the detective story and its virtues in an age of what she considered “shapeless fiction.”
“It must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The middle must be an extension and development of the beginning, and the end must be implicit in both. The writing is as good as the author can make it: nervous, taut, balanced and economic. Descriptive passages are vivid and explicit. The author is not self-indulgent. If he commands a good style, there is every reason for maintaining it. In an age of immensely long and undisciplined novels, one can do with some shapely ones, and in the midst of much pretentious obscurity, a touch of lucidity is not unwelcome.”
Besides, she had her revenge. She won an OBE in 1948, and then in 1966 was named Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for both her writing and theatre work. The 430-seat Ngaio Marsh Theatre at the University of Canterbury is named in her honor. Her home in Christchurch is preserved as a museum. In 1975, the Mystery Writers of America gave her the Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement. The Ngaio Marsh Award is given out every year for the best in New Zealand crime fiction. And on April 23, 2015, she was honored with—a Google Doodle.
Ngaio Marsh died in 1982. She had just approved the galleys of her final novel, Light Thickens.
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THE ESSENTIAL MARSH
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With any prolific author, readers are likely to have their own particular favorites, which may not be the same as someone else’s. Your list is likely to be just as good as mine—but here are the ones I recommend.
Vintage Murder (1937)
This is the first of the four books Marsh set in New Zealand, definitely one of the most entertaining of the theatre ones, and draws upon her experience touring with the Wilkie Company—it’s even dedicated to Wilkie and his wife.
The characters are lovingly described, even the odious ones—in fact, those are the kind of characters Marsh often seemed to enjoy describing most (wait’ll we get to Overture to Death)—and full of observations about theatrical denizens that could only come from long experience:
“He shrugged his shoulders and opened the door for her. They went out, moving beautifully, with years of training behind their smallest gestures. It is this unconscious professionalism in the everyday actions of actors that so often seems unreal to outsiders. When they are very young actors, it often is unreal, when they are older, it is merely habit. They are indeed ‘always acting,’ but not in the sense that their critics suggest.”
The murder itself is another one of Marsh’s fine concoctions. For a big on-stage celebration, the company’s producer has it rigged so that when a cord is cut, a giant jeroboam of champagne ceremoniously descends from the top gallery into a centerpiece of flowers and maidenhair fern. Its descent is somewhat more rapid than that, however, and bashes in the producer’s head. It is up to Alleyn, who is on vacation and staying at the same hotel as the company, to sort through what turns out to be a company’s-worth of motives and opportunity, with the help of a fellow guest, an eminent Maori physician, Dr. Rangi Te Pokiha.
It’s a smart mystery, with great local color, wit, and dramatis personae.
Artists in Crime (1938)
The book in which Agatha Troy is memorably introduced on p. 3, as she is trying to capture an exotic dockside scene, dressed in “exceedingly grubby flannel trousers,” her face smudged with green paint, and muttering, “Blast!” Alleyn is immediately smitten, but she is wary, and for the length of the book, they go through a Tracy-and-Hepburn push-and-pull. Alleyn’s cause is not helped much by the fact that, back home in England, he is called in to investigate a murder in an art class run by…Agatha Troy.
A life model’s pose has taken an unfortunate turn, due to a fatally-protruding knife, and it was quite clearly set up that way by someone in the class – or perhaps by the instructor herself. Alleyn is quite happy to let all the suspects talk and throw shade at each other, but meanwhile he is also, in his gentlemanly way, trying to make progress with Troy (she is always called “Troy,” never “Agatha”), only to find himself taking two steps backward for every step forward, causing him to exclaim “Blast!” himself a time or two.
Overture to Death (1939)
Here, Marsh’s character descriptions are pure gold, as she limns two viciously competing women in a small rural village. First, Eleanor Prentice:
“She dramatizes herself as the first lady of the district. The squiress. The chatelaine…She disseminated the odor of sanctity. Her perpetual half-smile suggested that she was of a gentle and sweet disposition…That was a mistake.”
And then Idris Campanula:
“A large arrogant spinster with a firm bust, a high-colored complexion, coarse gray hair, and enormously bony hands. Her clothes were hideous, but expensive, for Miss Campanula was extremely wealthy. She was supposed to be Eleanor Prentice’s great friend. Their alliance was based on mutual antipathies and interests. Each adored scandal and each cloaked her passion in a mantle of conscious rectitude. Neither trusted the other an inch.”
It is Idris Campanula who presses the piano pedal at the beginning of the Rachmaninoff, setting off the gun that shoots her dead. “Miss Campanula fell forward. Her face slid down the sheet of music, which stuck to it. Very slowly and stealthily, she slipped sideways to the keys of the piano, striking a final discord in the bass.”
I can’t say too much about this book. I love it to pieces, all the more so because reputedly Ngaio Marsh did not particularly care for Dorothy L. Sayers, and these two characters are digs at her. Eleanor Prentice of the Hall is a reference to Sayers’s U.S. publisher, Prentice-Hall. Prentice also cannot control herself when she hears church bells ringing. Campanula literally means “bell ringer,” and is an allusion to Sayers’s book The Nine Tailors (the nine strokes at the beginning a toll that announce a man is dead).
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BOOK BONUS
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In 2018, a writer named Stella Duffy was brought in to complete a book begun by Marsh during World War II, but abandoned. Duffy had three chapters, some notes, and the book’s title—Money in the Morgue—but that was all. I haven’t read it, but by all accounts, it’s quite good, filled with Marsh-like touches and New Zealand insights.
As a further book note, Marsh’s regular hardcover publisher in the States was Little, Brown, and as it happens, I worked at Little, Brown from 1970 to 1974, during which When in Rome, Tied Up in Tinsel, and Black as He’s Painted were published. I wasn’t an editor yet—two of us cranked out all the jacket copy, catalogue copy, and most of the press releases for the entire Little, Brown trade list. Which means that if you ever lay hands on a hardcover copy of one of those three books, you’re likely to find my deathless prose on the flaps of at least one or two of them.
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MOVIE/TV BONUS
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Under the title Ngaio Marsh Theatre, four television movies were made in New Zealand between 1975 and 1978 of four Marsh books—Vintage Murder, Died in the Wool, Colour Scheme, and Opening Night (the British title for what was called in the U.S. Night at the Vulcan). I don’t know if they ever made it to the U.S. What did make it here, because I dimly remember seeing some of them, was the British nine-episode series Alleyn Mysteries, starring Patrick Malahide, which were produced from 1990 to 1994. As I recall, they were charming. They are available from Amazon Prime Video.
And an audio bonus—there is an audio book of Death in a White Tie, read by Benedict Cumberbatch. I know that for many of you, I need say no more.
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CELEBRITY STORY BONUS
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In the 1940s through the 1960s, Marsh conducted a lengthy association with a New Zealand outfit called the Drama Society, which resulted in twenty full-scale Shakespearean productions. In 1948, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh came to Australia and New Zealand on tour with the Old Vic, and Marsh’s students were asked to entertain them after the performance. She had them do the first act of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, and the Oliviers loved it so much, they urged her to take her troupe to Australia. She sprang into action, and from it came a hectic three-week tour in January and February of 1949, which Marsh recalled as “one of the most exciting things that has ever happened to me.” She was later to take the Six Characters for a run in London, as well.
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META BONUS
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“It’s only—I know nothing about such things, of course, nothing. But I do read some of Edward’s thrillers, and it always seems to me that in the stories, they make everything rather more elaborate than it would in real life.”
“This is not a discussion on the dubious realism of detective fiction, Agnes.”
—Colour Scheme
*
“Do you read crime fiction?”
“I dote on it. It’s such a relief to escape from one’s work into an entirely different atmosphere.”
“It’s not as bad as that,” Nigel protested.
“Perhaps not quite as bad as that. Any faithful account of police investigations, even in the most spectacular homicide case, would be abysmally dull. I should have thought you’d seen enough of the game to realize that. The files are a plethora of drab details, most of them entirely irrelevant. Your crime novelist gets all over that by writing grandly about routine work and then selecting the essentials. Quite rightly. He’d be the world’s worst bore if he did otherwise.”
—The Nursing Home Murder
*
“It’s like one of those affairs in books,” said Bailey disgustedly. “Someone trying to think up a new way to do a murder. Silly, I call it.”
“What do you say, Roper?” said Alleyn.
“To my way of thinking, sir,” said Sergeant Roper, “these thrillers are ruining our criminal classes.”
—Overture to Death
