Death on the Air

by Ngaio Marsh

  COURT REPORTER: (if guilty) Mary Freebody was remanded in custody for psychiatric reports.

  MY POOR BOY

  My Poor Boy was written for a talk on New Zealand Radio in 1959 and was subsequently printed in the Listener. As a postscript to this collection it offers Ngaio Marsh a fitting last word…

  My Poor Boy,

  So you want to be an author. O, my poor boy. I wonder why you want to be an author. Your letter, in common with almost all the, I’m afraid, very many other similar letters that I have been sent, tells me everything but that. It says that in your schooldays you frequently discovered the econium V.G. written in the margins of your essays. It says that you would like me to tell you how you can find a publisher for the novel that you have in mind but of which you have not yet written the opening chapter. You add that whenever you think about beginning your novel you feel disheartened because you can’t be sure it will ever see the light of day and that, as often as you are visited by this depressing notion, the fount of your inspiration dries up and you are unable to make a beginning. You say in parenthesis that your sister, who sounds a detestable girl, has a habit of picking up your poems and of reading them aloud with grotesque gestures and serio-comic inflexions to the ill-concealed amusement of your family. You ask if I think this is fair. You enclose a piece you have written on the sexual behaviour of blind eels which you submitted without success for publication in a New Zealand monthly. You say that you dislike your present job. Finally, you offer to collaborate with me in the writing of a detective novel for which you have an original plot. You say that on receiving my acceptance of your offer you will be glad to arrange a meeting, outline this plot and come to an appropriate business arrangement. O my poor boy.

  Shall I try to answer your letter in reverse, beginning with its concluding offer? To this offer my answer is no. I hope the reason for my refusal will declare itself as I go on and shall merely point out that if your plot is as good as you believe it to be and you do in fact want to become a professional writer, it would be an excellent point of departure. Why not use it for an attempt at your own first detective novel? Believe me, one can’t enter this particular arena on the back of one of the oldstagers. Either you go in under your own steam, as every published writer has had to do in the beginning, or you decide that you don’t feel like taking the risk of working very hard for no reward. In which case you are not, even potentially, a writer.

  You dislike your present job. That’s a depressing state of affairs but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the alternative is authorship. Please don’t entertain for a moment the utterly mistaken idea that there is no drudgery in writing. There is a great deal of drudgery in even the most inspired, the most noble, the most distinguished writing. Read what the great ones have said about their jobs; how they never sit down to their work without a sigh of distress and never get up from it without a sigh of relief. Do you imagine that your Muse is forever flame-like – breathing the inspired word, the wonderful situation, the superb solution into your attentive ear? Not at all. She can just as often appear as some acidulated schoolmarm, some nagging, shrill-voiced spouse or sulking girlfriend. ‘You got yourself into this mess,’ she points out. ‘All right. Get yourself out of it. How many words have you written today? What’s the latest excuse for taking a day off? You’re not, I hope, depending on me to do it for you? I’m your Muse not your stand-in and I’ll thank you to remember it.’ Believe me, my poor boy, if you wait for inspiration in our set-up, you’ll wait for ever. It’s true that on good days the minor miracles do tend to crop up but one generally finds in the long run that one’s best work is the stuff that has been ground out between the upper and nether millstones of self-criticism and hard labour. Of the antics of your sister I have little to say. Unless, with your indulgence, I may tell you that I wrote one of my most successful stories within the bosom of a family whose favourite pastime was to add chunks of nonsense to my manuscripts and shout aloud, with shrieks of laughter, the words they read over my shoulder as I was writing them.

  Which brings us up to your not-yet-begun novel. What I have to say about this follows upon what I have already said. If you wait for fair weather, inspiration and no external interference, you will never begin it. You may be able to write a novel, you may not. You will never know until you have worked very hard indeed and written at least part of it. You will never really know until you have written the whole of it and submitted it for publication. You talk about detective fiction so I will assume that it is in this field, or an associated one, that you hope to work. May I draw your attention to one or two points? Nowadays, a good plot, an amusing anecdote and a string of lively episodes laced with a certain amount of factual information will not get you very far in any field of writing. These are essential ingredients but they can be ruined in the hands of a bad cook. In other words, you must be a craftsman – I will not pay an artist since my purpose is to avoid the grandiose. You must be able to write. You must have a sense of form, of pattern, of design. You must have a respect for and a mastery oyer words. The writer of a thriller has no need to haul down his stylistic flag a quarter of an inch. Indeed, he has every reason not to do so. He will be read by persons of the educated sort – by university dons, by professors, doctors, clergymen, scientists, serious novelists, poets, journalists and members of the nobility. He will not be read by people whose interest in the written word is confined solely to the racing news, the football results and the scandal columns. Quite on the contrary. He is writing in a genre and an exacting, difficult genre at that.

  Do you think you can do this? All I have to go by is your rejected article on the sex habits of blind eels. I have read it and I have also read a copy of the New Zealand journal that rejected it. Now, in the first place, literary merit apart, it is by no means the kind of thing these people are looking for. So, however well you may or may not have written it, you have made your initial mistake in sending it to the wrong market. But suppose you sent it to some appropriate scientific publication. Is it sufficiently well-informed and authoritative to find a home there? Knowing nothing of blind eels, I venture to suggest that it is not. So perhaps you have written an unsaleable article. Never mind. It was an exercise. Let us examine it purely as a piece of writing. To my mind it contains two sentences that have some distinction, some feeling for your instrument, some flavour of individuality. Two sentences are not enough to make it a good piece of writing but they are enough to make one wonder if, after all, you may not have a gift of words. Let us suppose that you have.

  We arrive at your first question. How can you hope to find a publisher? My poor boy, by doing in a big way precisely what you have already done in a small one. By writing your novel. By sweating it out. By setting yourself the highest standard and by re-writing whenever you have fallen away from that standard. By preparing yourself to take the mortification of rejection slips. And also by remembering one or two points about publication which I shall now try to set out.

  Publishers are continually on the look-out for authors. They do not exist in a constant state of haughty rejection. They yearn for authors. Every spring and every autumn they lavish thousands of pounds upon launching a new author in whom they have faith. They are even prepared to lose terrifying sums of money on a first novel if they think the author will ultimately command a public. Contrary to some opinions, they also have a standard to maintain and, in many cases, the standard of a great tradition. They are not unapproachable.

  On the other hand, most publishing houses are not prepared to risk launching more than a limited number of unknown authors in a year. So that, suppose, my poor boy, you send your first novel off to Messrs Format and Serif and they think it well up to publishing standard, they may still reject it on the grounds that they have already signed up as many new authors as they can comfortably manage for the publishing season.

  If, however, you entrust your book to a reputable agent he will know which publishers are on the lookout for a new author and will offer
your book to them. He will not undertake to handle it unless he thinks he has a good chance of selling it. He will, if he succeeds in doing so, take 10% of everything you earn. If, in the ripeness of time, he finds an American publisher, he will watch your contracts there and protect you from piracy and raw deals. He will also try to get pre-publication serial rights and will have an eye on broadcasting, television and the cinema. He is an expert. There are reputable agents and there are disreputable ones. The good agents are listed in the Authors and Composers Year Book, a publication you will be well advised to study. I have always dealt with an agent. He sold my first novel 25 years ago and has, I consider, done me proud ever since.

  And so we have worked out way back to this one thing you have not told me about yourself. Why do you want to become an author? I will accept only one answer. If it is because you feel you can write better than you can do anything else then go ahead and do it without frills and flourishes. Stick to your present job and write in your spare time: but do it as if it is a whole time job. Depend on nobody but yourself. Don’t talk about what you are doing – something goes wrong if you talk – because writing is a lonely job. If you are very lucky you may find one friend with whom it is good to discuss your work while it is in process. But be sure you have found the right one before you open your mouth. If you think journalism will help – and I’m not committing myself there except to say that good journalism is a very different thing from journalese – try your hand at freelance articles but find out the sort of thing that is wanted before you start. Above all things – read. Read the great stylists who cannot be copied rather than the successful writers who must not be copied. Don’t try and turn yourself into a Hemingway, rather listen to E M Forster or V S Prichett or Proust or Daniel Defoe. Read what people like Maugham have to say about style and what people like Maurice Richardson have to say about Maugham.

  And write simply. And re-write and write again and – O my poor boy,

  I remain, with compassion,

  Yours sincerely,

  About the Author

  Dame Ngaio Marsh was born in New Zealand in 1895 and died in February 1982. She wrote over 30 detective novels and many of her stories have theatrical settings, for Ngaio Marsh’s real passion was the theatre. She was both actress and producer and almost single-handedly revived the New Zealand public’s interest in the theatre. It was for this work that she received what she called her ‘damery’ in 1966.

  Also by the Author

  A Man Lay Dead

  Enter a Murderer

  The Nursing Home Murder

  Death in Ecstasy

  Vintage Murder

  Artists in Crime

  Death in a White Tie

  Overture to Death

  Death at the Bar

  Surfeit of Lampreys

  Death and the Dancing Footman

  Colour Scheme

  Died in the Wool

  Final Curtain

  Swing, Brother, Swing

  Opening Night

  Spinsters in Jeopardy

  Scales of Justice

  Off With His Head

  Singing in the Shrouds

  False Scent

  Hand in Glove

  Dead Water

  Death at the Dolphin

  Clutch of Constables

  When in Rome

  Tied up in Tinsel

  Black As He’s Painted

  Last Ditch

  Grave Mistake

  Photo-Finish

  Light Thickens

  Death on the Air and Other Stories

  Black Beech and Honeydew (autobiography)

  Copyright

  HarperCollinsPublishers

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  This edition published 2000

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1995

  First published in the USA as The Collected Short Fiction of Ngaio Marsh by International Polygonics Ltd 1989

  Copyright © Ngaio Marsh (Jersey) Limited 1989

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