Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime

by Joanne Drayton

  Like his sleuthing peers, Alleyn would mature, but not as much because he began more plausibly. There would be excursions abroad, but his natural habitat would remain the English hothouse cosy where traditional values were just a murder away from being restored. The anarchy of war, the devastation of pandemic, the General Strike of 1926, the Great Depression, and the rise of Communism and Fascism with their catastrophic episodes of genocide never properly enter his cloistered world where a single death can still be utterly shocking.

  Explaining the extraordinary demand for the detective novel, Margery Allingham wrote: ‘When the moralists cite the modern murder mystery as evidence of an unnatural love of violence in a decadent age, I wonder if it is nothing of the sort, but rather a sign of a popular instinct for order and form in a period of sudden and chaotic change […] There is something deeply healthy in the implication that to deprive a human being of his life is not only the most dreadful thing one can do to him, but also that it matters to the rest of us.’ Faced with the flux of a rapidly changing world, readers sought intellectual escape in problem plots where sanitized death teased the minds of anyone from a housewife to a judge. While global war and economic slump eroded the class system and beat at the bastions of the family manor house, the detective novel offered fictional stability. Anybody with a stake in the restoration of traditional order was a potential reader. The detective novel portrayed a world of proscriptive hierarchies and reassuring ritual. It assumed a reasoned universe based on polarities of right and wrong where anarchy occasionally erupted but normality was always restored. And no one could be a more chivalrous representative of the status quo than that ‘perfect specimen of English manhood’, Roderick Alleyn.

  As an orderly man in an ordered form, he required little personal revelation from Ngaio Marsh. Like the other Queens of Crime, Ngaio shunned uncomfortable publicity. She seemed largely conformist, from a conservative background, writing in an era when women were expected to behave conventionally. The crime novel kept up appearances by preserving her from the necessity of exploring difficult feelings. The genre exposed to public scrutiny her intellect and literary skills rather than her emotions. Ngaio was the most secretive of this very self-protective group. As crime novelist commentator Jessica Mann writes, ‘she exemplifies in its most extreme form the reticence of the crime novelist…[she] never wrote anything which touched her emotions more deeply’ and ‘one senses withdrawal’.

  Ngaio was the only Antipodean Crime Queen, and although she often left New Zealand’s parochial fish bowl, she never escaped it. This made her, as she described it, ‘a looker on in England’. But she was also something of an Anglophile outsider at home. Colonization creates cultural refugees and Ngaio was one of these, a wanderer between worlds, never belonging completely to any place or culture. But displacement does not explain the intensity of her need for privacy. In 32 novels written over nearly 50 years, she exposed countless villains, but never herself. She was a doyenne of concealment, knowing exactly what evidence was incriminating and who would point the finger. There are, however, clues to understanding this complex and elusive woman. Ngaio felt strong emotions. ‘I guess I fell in love with them,’ she said of the aristocratic family she stayed with in Britain, and love is as good a place as any to begin a mystery.

  Ngaio’s rusty freighter-cum-passenger ship steamed up the Thames, docking at Tilbury in the early summer of 1928. She was ecstatic about her first visit to England. ‘We were bewilderingly gay,’ she remembered, ‘I got the tag end of a very ravished but very wonderful 1920s in London.’ She went immediately to stay with her friends Helen and Tahu Rhodes, and their burgeoning family of five children. On her arrival at their magnificent Georgian mansion, Ngaio was greeted by a joke ‘For Sale on Easy Terms’ sign, which set the tone of her stay. Ngaio found the Rhodes family’s theatricality, their irrepressible enthusiasm for practical jokes, for putting on costumes, for making up and acting up, irresistible. She would live with them on and off while in England; first at Alderbourne Manor near Gerrards Cross in Buckinghamshire, and later in London.

  This would become a méage à trois of sorts, held together by the infatuation of the two women. Helen, known as Nelly, was the eldest daughter of Lord Plunket, who had been Governor of New Zealand from 1904 to 1910. In 1916, she married her handsome soldier husband, Captain Tahu Rhodes, at an English church packed with wounded soldiers who had been driven to the service in Red Cross vehicles from the New Zealand hospital at Walton-on-Thames.

  The pattern of Ngaio’s weekend stays with the couple had begun when they returned to New Zealand at the end of the First World War. Tahu Rhodes, a childhood friend, owned Meadowbank, a large sheep station at Ellesmere, about 30 kilometres south-east of her hometown of Christchurch. Through her fund-raising activities in the theatre, Ngaio picked up the threads of her acquaintance with Tahu and was introduced to his wife, Nelly. The women’s friendship became lifelong and binding.

  In New Zealand, Ngaio had wandered listlessly from one touring theatre production to another, searching for something permanent and sustaining. She had acted in, written and directed plays; she had been to art school and produced paintings for exhibitions; she had written articles for the Sun newspaper. But after the Rhodeses’ return to England in 1927, her enthusiasm for bit-jobs diminished in direct proportion to her desire to travel ‘Home’. Much more than a literal home, England was for her a cultural pantheon presided over by her giant of literary gods, William Shakespeare. When it came, the invitation from the Rhodeses burst like a blaze of fireworks across a night sky. She was rapturous. Her parents were the only tug on her emotions. However, her doting bank-clerk father, Henry Marsh, and his economizing wife, Rose, magnanimously scrambled to pay their only child’s passage to England. It meant a more spartan life than usual, but the opportunity for Ngaio to travel and stay with such illustrious friends abroad was impossible to miss.

  Alderbourne, with its vast number of rooms and workforce—which included a butler, a footman, a full domestic staff, plus a nanny and a lady’s maid—was a shock for Ngaio. The Rhodes family had returned to England to economize. They had found their big house, large staff and lavish life of weekend parties unsustainable in New Zealand. To Ngaio, however, Alderbourne Manor seemed luxurious. She waited for the ominous day when the Rhodes family ‘bandwagon’, as she called it, with its English ‘rebore’ and fresh ‘coat of paint’, lurched into another period of desperate insolvency. In the meantime, she took her seat.

  A photograph taken on a Rhodes family holiday in Kent shows the easy comfort of the family group and their coterie of perpetual guests. Four high-spirited children, wearing swimsuits, sit in the front row with a favourite dog, while another is carried piggyback. Behind them are the adults, in soft suits that pull and pucker. On the far right, slightly apart, stands Tahu Rhodes. He was a captain in the Grenadier Guards, and there is still a trace of formality in the slicked-back black hair, prominent moustache and heavy-featured, swarthy good looks. Beside him is the crop-haired, trouser-clad, boyish figure of Ngaio. She was nearly 6 feet (1.8 metres) tall, and even in her 30s she carried the imprint of youth and a touch of the awkward teenager in her lanky stature. She was striking, with strong rather than conventionally beautiful features, a prominent nose, dark close-set eyes and tightly wavy dark hair. Toppy Blundell Hawkes stands open-faced and smiling between Ngaio and Nelly. He was a good-natured English farm cadet who became a favourite after staying with the Rhodes family in New Zealand. Nelly is squat and somewhat plain, but the warmth of her personality is evident in her face, which beams broadly. A 1920s hat is pulled down tightly on her head, and she is wearing a full-length, flecked dress-suit, which is comfortable rather than elegant. What is evident in the photograph is their delight at being together on holiday.

  Ngaio joined the Society of Authors, and at Alderbourne Manor, in the midst of a noisy household of children, wrote syndicated accounts of her travels for newspapers in New Zealand. She hoped journalism would
make her more independent of her parents’ finances. The first of many articles, under the pen name ‘A New Canterbury Pilgrim’, was published in the Christchurch Press on 1 September 1928. She began by describing her departure from New Zealand. ‘I know of no experience that compares with the adventure of setting out on one’s travels…for me, at least, the office of Thomas Cook and Son, Christchurch, will always be the enchanted parlour whose doors open straight into Wonderland.’ Like many creative colonial women of her generation, Ngaio felt travelling to Britain and Europe was like slipping into a magical parallel universe. New Zealand offered few opportunities in writing, art or the theatre, and, for women particularly, these were isolating, often desperate pursuits. Even after the First World War, remnants of Victorian provincialism hung like a miasma over cities such as Christchurch. Expatriate Australian artist and writer Stella Bowen described Christchurch’s sister city Adelaide as ‘a queer little backwater of intellectual timidity’ which, ‘isolated by three immense oceans…lies…prettyish, banal, and filled to the brim with an anguish of boredom’. This was what Ngaio felt she was leaving. It was also a chance to escape the confines of her relationship with her parents, to become independent—an adult even—and define herself as someone new.

  Her first stop on the long sea voyage, which would take nearly eight weeks, was Sydney, where she witnessed a half-span of the harbour bridge going up. She saw a production of Henry VIII put on in Newton by her old actor-manager friend Allan Wilkie, and went to the city’s ‘grandiloquent’ state gallery which stands on a hill flanked by giant statues of snorting steeds bearing symbolic figures of ‘war and peace’. In the English section of the gallery, she was taken by the work of Impressionist Laura Knight, and in the Australian, by the Post-Impressionist Margaret Preston. ‘They are brilliantly painted,’ she wrote of Preston’s still-lifes, ‘they seem to reveal the very spirit of flowers without a touch of over-representation or sentimentality. Her sense of pattern is…inspiring.’ In the colonies Ngaio’s taste in art was modern, and her discussion of Preston perceptive, but in European centres that had wrestled with Cubist deconstruction, Dada nihilism and the psychosis of Surrealism, it was traditional. Her final visit was to the new Cabaret-Romanos, where she found heterogeneous humanity dancing cheek-to-cheek to the ‘muted “Blues” of the best Jazz in Sydney’.

  In Hobart, she shuddered at photographs of the ‘dreadful instruments’ of penal correction used in the former convict prison and noted the sad demise of Aboriginal culture in the face of English settlement. She found Melbourne cooler and more decorous than hot-blooded, sun-baked Sydney. Here she again visited the state gallery, noting the work of late 19th-century ‘moderns’ like idiosyncratic Symbolist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, and the painting of French and English Impressionists such as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Frank Brangwyn, John Singer Sargent and Sir William Orpen. Again, her taste was conservative. The highlight of her stay was a lavish production, by the Melba-Williamson Grand Opera Company, of Puccini’s unfinished Turandot. ‘The audience at the opera in Melbourne is a very festive one and the gorgeous theatre coats made a brave show against the florid brilliance of the gilt walls. Many of the men wore tails and white ties.’ Ngaio relished the rituals of class and culture and felt it gave the event dignity. She was naturally attracted to the theatrical, even camp accessories of upper-crust society, and this fascination lasted. Her observation of aristocratic manners was acute, and her belief in them shifted from born-again conviction to good-humoured scepticism.

  The liver-coloured, coal-burning Balranald was making a last long sea voyage to the wreckers’ yard, and Ngaio’s berth was cramped, yet shipboard life appealed to her. She eagerly participated in deck games and dressing up for performances and parties, and delighted in the company of the other passengers. Already Ngaio was fascinated by the pursuit of people-watching, especially in a confined space. ‘I have always had a vague and ill-informed interest in crowd-psychology, and never was there a better opportunity of studying it.’ She could watch people with impunity—‘Australians who wanted to see the world, Americans who have seen it and insisted on telling you about it, Swedish, Greek, Armenians and Italian wanderers…South Africans’—and share her amusing observations with her Christchurch readers. It took three weeks to reach the coast of Africa, and by then much of the food on board was stale or bad. The water made people sick and, opening a folded slice of cold meat, she ‘found it encrusted with small shells’. Ngaio decided ‘to cut loose’ and eat in Durban.

  She was enchanted by the city’s strangeness. ‘The first excitement we [Ngaio and a fellow passenger] encountered was a row of Zulu rickshaw men with their amazing head-dresses of quills, feathers, and horns, their fur tippets and painted legs.’ The rickshaw ride to the hotel through sunny streets that thronged with ‘Hindoos, Kaffirs, Zulus…white people…[and] beautiful Indian women in ample robes of vivid blue and scarlet and cerise’ was as colourful as it was exhilarating. On a hill, the driver drew himself onto the shafts of the rickshaw and ‘we free-wheeled at an alarming speed while he rang his cow bell at the crossings’. They recovered from their ordeal by drinking coffee on the loggia of the hotel ‘and looking on at the pageant of the streets’. Ngaio saw Sybil Thorndike, her husband Lewis Casson, and their small daughter in a revival of The Liars by Henry Arthur Jones, and in a packed Indian market she bought the food she had promised herself. For sixpence she filled a colossal basket with pineapples, oranges, pawpaws, succulent tangerines and gigantic grapefruit. Ngaio ached to paint the scene, with its bustle of humanity and kaleidoscope of costumes, produce, deeply shaded little shops and brilliant lengths of silk, but she had time only to take a photograph and make a quick sketch on the back of an envelope. She wrote about the market in her ‘Pilgrim’ article before she painted it. Increasingly she was capturing the world around her in words rather than paint, but she pictured it vividly with an artist’s eye.

  Durban’s racism troubled her. She had qualms about taking a rickshaw ride, and described with contempt the treatment of a black man who ‘ran in front of three sullen-looking Dutch youths, who turned on him savagely’. She concluded: ‘I remember Mr J H Curle’s contention that it is the under-bred white who, at bedrock, is responsible for the “colour question”’, and this is what she believed. Ngaio was sensitive about race and culture. As a Pakeha in New Zealand, she had seen the plight of Maori in the face of colonization, and she felt for their loss of culture, language and land. She saw pathos in the position of the ‘aboriginals who have seen the coming of the English and the changing of their ways’. Ngaio was born a Victorian, her liberalism was flawed and limited, and her thinking sometimes straitjacketed by convention and class, but she despised racial prejudice. The final picture she painted of Durban was one that disturbed her. It was the fading image of ‘a grinning kaffir boy’ dancing on the wharf. He had made friends with children on the boat. ‘“He’s a nice nigger boy,” said a little girl. “He does what I tell him, ‘Dance boy’.” He danced and waved his arms obediently…till we slid away and the children lost interest in him.’

  From Durban, the Balranald sailed in heavy seas down the coast of Africa to Cape Town, where Ngaio met Uncle Freddie, one of Henry Marsh’s six brothers. Their father, a tea broker in the days of clipper ships, had died suddenly leaving his widow in a small Georgian house near Epping with a family of 10 children to bring up. The sons, desperate for financial independence and opportunity left, England for Canada, South Africa and New Zealand, adventurers out to make their fortunes. ‘There seems to have been no thought of university or profession for any of them,’ Ngaio later wrote. ‘The Colonies, it was felt, were the thing.’

  Henry learned Chinese at London University for a position in the Hong Kong-Shanghai Bank, but this plan was cut short by a bout of pleurisy and an invigorating year on the veldt of South Africa. A solution to his employment problem came from his father’s eldest brother, who was Governor of Hong Kong. While this uncle was staying in New Ze
aland, he secured the offer of a good position for his nephew with the Colonial Bank. When Henry arrived, however, the unthinkable happened: the bank crashed and he was forced to take a humble clerk’s job with the Bank of New Zealand. He remained in the same position for the rest of his life. Ngaio’s Uncle Freddie, now permanent secretary to the Governor-General’s Fund in Cape Town, was luckier. He and his family proudly escorted Ngaio around the sights of the city, which included the museum, the ancient colonial house of Koopmans-de Wet, the ‘old Curfew bell that…call [ed] the slaves in from their work’, and the ‘ill-tailored statue’ of former prime minister and colonizing magnate, Cecil Rhodes.

  A sultry yellow sun beat unrelentingly down as they steamed along the Gold Coast. ‘When the land breeze gets up it fans us with the accumulated heat of all Africa,’ Ngaio wrote, ‘but tomorrow we turn away towards Las Palmas, and sail out of the tropics.’

  When she finally reached the silver-grey misty seas of England she could hardly believe it. ‘Just before dawn the cabin steward made an isolated gesture. For the first time on the voyage he brought me a cup of tea. He said…the water had been filtered…I thanked him warmly and had drunk half the tea when I found the rest of the cup was full of a thick, viscid, grey silt.’

  It was with a huge sense of relief and excitement that she met the Rhodes family on the wharf. They drove her through streets that were noisy monuments to history after the colonial outposts and cicada-serenaded towns she knew. She was infatuated. Her first excursions from Alderbourne Manor into London were dream-like. ‘There is the same fascination here,’ she wrote, ‘as there was in the brilliance and heat of the Indian market in Durban.’ One of the early stage shows she saw was Agatha Christie’s Alibi, which was a ‘detective drama, remarkable for the really brilliant acting of Mr Charles Laughton as M. Poirot’. She emerged afterwards onto warm summer-evening streets to see ‘men in their evening dress, not wearing over coats or hats…[looking] exotic and important’ and women with cloaks tied around their necks who seemed ‘to move as though they are walking across a stage’.