Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime

by Joanne Drayton

  It seemed an idyllic existence until they took a walk in hills behind the castle, and discovered a carefully concealed Jewish graveyard. ‘The headstones bore the symbol of interwoven triangles & carried among them most of the familiar village names.’ Nearly 100 years before, a vine-growing nobleman had introduced Jewish workers to the district and they had settled and inter-married. Almost everyone was touched by this legacy, especially Frau and Herr Koppel, ‘an old couple, the man disabled, who bore very clearly the physical signs of their mixed ancestry. They were terribly poor & eked out a livelihood by selling sweets & screws of tobacco & faded postcards in their room on the market square.’ The sound of jackboots on Beilstein’s cobblestones heralded a new era. While Ngaio sat on the castle battlements writing letters, she watched three Gestapo arrive by river raft. Disturbed by what she saw, she joined her friends in their room overlooking the square. ‘All over the little town there was the sound of slamming doors. Followed by complete silence’, and then the sound of Gestapo boots as they went around the houses. Before departing they pinned up a notice in the square. That evening a bell was rung to gather townspeople in the square. Leaflets were distributed and the mayor read a proclamation.

  ‘The people of the town were warned that they would no longer be considered true Nordic citizens if they continued to patronize the tiny shop kept by the old couple…or communicate with them in any way.’ Ngaio saw the Koppels once more a few nights later. It was stiflingly hot, the early hours of the morning, and she was awake and restless. She got up and went to the window that looked over the square. In the moonlight she caught sight of something unexpected. It was the old woman standing ‘stock-still’. ‘Her hands were folded in a shawl, her heavy face up turned to the light. She had dared to come out for a moment.’ Beyond her in deeper shadow was her husband. ‘I felt myself an intruder & I drew away from the window. But I couldn’t help listening.’ For a long time there was silence, then the faint tinkle of a shop bell. They had gone indoors—they would be gone for good. The scene was ominous, and Ngaio knew it. ‘It seemed to me that the little town was threatened with madness, that a great surge of lethal insanity was rolling up the Mosel like a tidal wave & that these peasants with their little dram of Jewish blood were doomed.’

  Ngaio wrote when she could during the day and late at night. She sat out on the battlements or in the Lippmanns’ terraced garden among carnations and ‘night-scented stocks’ and worked on Death in a White Tie. They savoured the delights of the wine cellar. They paddled and swam in the Mosel River and collected strawberries from the nearby woods, where one afternoon they met a young New Zealander who proclaimed the wonders of Nazi Germany. But all the time there were signs that something heinous was happening. Ngaio saw a group of small schoolboys on holiday with their teacher. All day he drilled them. ‘They even bathed to orders bobbing up & down in routine & morning & evening they recited a sort of creed ending with their drawn out cry—“Heil Hitler”.’ A vitriolic denunciation of the Jews was nailed to cottage doors in Beilstein. The people were frightened, and their fear was infectious. As soon as Betty Cotterill was well, the New Zealanders left.

  Their ‘journey through 6 realms’ would take them ‘from London to Vienna’, but sadly the rest of their itinerary was unrecorded. Ngaio met up with Nelly Rhodes in October and they holidayed in Monte Carlo. Unlike the publicly documented road trip, this was a private meeting of close friends. During her 1937-38 English visit, Ngaio spent a considerable amount of time with the Rhodes family. She stayed with them for a while in an old schoolhouse, and at country residences. It is likely Ngaio was with Nelly when she toured Devon and Cornwall in early 1938, and stayed in the fishing village of Polperro on the Cornish coast. Ngaio developed a great affection for the Rhodes children, who were getting older and more interesting, and during this visit she illustrated ‘Over the Edge of the Earth’, a children’s story written by Eileen, the eldest Rhodes daughter. The slightly stiff pen-and-ink illustrations have a redeeming, surreal quality that is intriguing. Unfortunately, the enthusiastically conceived joint project was never published.

  In 1938, Ngaio had the thrill of seeing a pair of titles published that represented the fruition of nearly two years’ hard work. Artists in Crime and Death in a White Tie were well received by British and American critics. There was a sense that her stature had not yet been fully recognized. ‘Miss Marsh is a novelist of variety as well as an expert craftsman of crime,’ wrote the critic for Punch in February 1938. ‘She deserves to be much better known.’ There was an appreciation, too, of her ingenuity and sheer brilliance at evoking a grisly scene. The critic for the Church Times described the second murder in Artists in Crime, as ‘probably the best bit of crime writing of the year’, and, in the opinion of The Observer, Ngaio Marsh specialized in ‘cunning and novel modes of inflicting death’ and had a ‘bold and happy gift of portraiture’.

  The reception of Death in a White Tie a little later in the year was equally enthusiastic, although, as Edmund Cork had predicted, there were mixed responses to the introduction of Alleyn’s love interest. ‘Death in a White Tie is the best type of detective story and well up to Miss Marsh’s previous high standards,’ wrote the reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement, in September.

  [It] has only one serious defect. The chief inspector is made to pursue his love affair…It would be a pity if the example set by Miss Sayers with Lord Peter Wimsey of entangling her detective of seemingly settled and delightful bachelor habits in a serious-minded love affair were to be regularly followed by all writers of detective stories…romance is not Miss Marsh’s metier, and some of the dialogue leaves one a bit hot under the collar. It is hoped, with all due respect to Miss Sayers, that when Alleyn is next confronted with a corpse it will not be in the course of his honeymoon.

  For many enthusiasts, and even crime fiction reviewers, the introduction of a series wife to partner a series detective was corrosive of conventions designed to secure the purity of the puzzle.

  Although this thinking was laced with implicit misogyny, it was not an exclusively male argument. Agatha Christie found love ‘a terrible bore in detective stories’ and felt that it belonged more appropriately in romance stories. ‘To force a love motif into what should be a scientific process went much against the grain.’

  Christie was safe in making these assertions because her detectives were not obviously marriageable material: a heart-stopping romance was not expected of Poirot or Miss Marple. Wimsey, Campion and Alleyn, on the other hand, were youngish, red-blooded males with assumed sexual needs. As Jessica Mann points out, ‘a series hero who is allowed to mature in other ways must either prove to be a selfish bastard’—like James Bond who played the field—‘[or] fix his affection on one particular girl and…marry her’. Without some degree of sexual and emotional development, these detectives would be stunted. Series romance and marriage fitted also with their authors’ shared aspiration to raise the detective novel above the level of a puzzle plot. If their sleuths were to become more psychologically complex, they needed a third dimension—an emotional life.

  Harriet Vane had simmered away as a potential long-term liaison for Lord Peter Wimsey since her trial for the murder of former lover, Philip Boyes, in Strong Poison in 1930. Wimsey is transfixed at their first meeting. She will face the hangman’s noose if he does not find the real killer. Vane and Boyes have been living together as lovers. Boyes has been an opponent of marriage, so when he turns around a year later and proposes, she is angered by his hypocrisy and leaves. When he is found dead from arsenic poisoning, Vane has both motive and method because she is a crime writer researching this very subject for a new book. All the clues point to her. Certainly Sayers drew on her own life when she created Vane. Like Sayers, Vane is a first-generation woman graduate from Oxford. At heart she is an intellectual attracted, like Sayers, to academia. Vane’s relationship with bohemian-scrupled Boyes is like that of Sayers with John Cournos, and with Bill White. Like her creator,
Vane lives in a bedsit in Mecklenburgh Square, Bloomsbury, socializes with artists and writers, and makes an independent living from her crime fiction writing. She has similar experiences as a writer, and holds similar views. Vane refuses Wimsey’s proposal, even after she is acquitted of murder on his evidence. Gratitude, she believes, is no basis for marriage. Like Agatha Troy, Vane is reluctant to give up her freedom, and she finds Wimsey shallow and overbearing. Wimsey pursues his sweetheart, finally marrying her in Busman’s Honeymoon in 1937.

  In keeping with the swashbuckling flavour of her writing, Margery Allingham’s love interest for Campion is adventurous—the Amelia Earhart-style Amanda Fitton. Campion first meets her, aged 17, in Sweet Danger in 1933. Her parents are dead and she lives in the crumbling mansion of Pontisbright Mill in Suffolk, with her brother and sister. They are poor, and to make ends meet the ingenious Amanda works out a way of powering an electric car from a local watermill. This is an aphrodisiac for Campion, who has been called in to establish the ownership of Averna, a tiny oil-rich principality on the Adriatic. The Fittons are claimants, and Campion is charged with protecting them from thugs hired by an unscrupulous developer. At the end of the novel, Amanda asks Campion to take her into partnership and hints that ‘in about six years’ time she may be ready to marry. In The Fashion in Shrouds, published in 1937, Amanda reappears as an aircraft engineer. To distract attention from an awkward investigative moment, she announces her engagement to Campion. The super-sleuth is shocked, but warms to the idea. After a party to celebrate the breaking-off of their fake engagement, the jilted Campion argues with Amanda and throws her in the river. Somehow she manages to see this as a demonstration of his affection and at end of the novel they become properly engaged.

  These romantic liaisons in detective fiction prove to be ideal marriages, the sort the writers would have wanted for themselves. They are pairings of equality, where a super-sleuth’s match is an equally capable wife, who makes no career compromises. Amanda Campion’s work takes precedence over housekeeping, and Peter Wimsey is emphatic that Harriet’s writing is not to be interrupted by domestic trivia. Within the conventional institution of marriage, the Queens of Crime tackled a tricky modern problem that did not necessarily reflect the views of the status quo. Women’s equality in the workplace and at home was not a social assumption like the hierarchies of class, culture and religion. For many it was controversial. The Queens were not flagrant feminists or subversives, yet it was revolutionary in a genre that was assumed to reflect society’s established mores, to portray a marriage of equality as the norm.

  In Overture to Death, published in 1939, but inspired by Ngaio’s experiences in 1938, Alleyn writes a letter to Troy, committing himself to a modern marriage. In it he admits that his profession makes him ‘a chancey sort of lover…A fly-by-night who speaks to you at nine o’clock on Saturday evening, and soon after midnight is down in Dorset looking at lethal pianos.’ He makes a pledge:

  My dear and my darling Troy, you shall disappear, too, when you choose, into the austerity of your work, and never, never, never shall I look sideways, or disagreeably, or in the manner of the martyred spouse. Not as easy a promise as you think, but I make it.

  While Wimsey, Campion, and Alleyn were either engaged or honeymooning, Hercule Poirot was safely single and holidaying aboard a paddle steamer on the Nile.

  In 1937, Agatha Christie was in the Middle East with her husband Max Mallowan, who was leading an archaeological expedition to Tell Brak in Syria. Christie photographed and recorded finds at the site, and during her spare time began Death on the Nile, a novel set in Egypt where they took a break. She uses love mixed with greed as the motive for her crime. Simon Doyle and his rich heiress wife, Linnet, are on a luckless honeymoon, tracked down and stalked relentlessly by the thwarted Jacqueline de Bellefort, Simon’s former fiancée and Linnet’s former best friend. Linnet is eventually found shot through the head, with the letter ‘J’ drawn in blood on the wall to incriminate Jacqueline. Christie uses this romantic triangle to generate one of her cleverest plots. The novel was one of her favourites, and certainly, she thought, one of her best ‘foreign travel’ books.

  Death on the Nile was well received by critics, some of whom were rapturous. ‘She has excelled herself,’ wrote the critic for the Evening News, ‘…must call for unqualified praise.’ Even The Times reviewer admired the complexity: ‘Must be read twice, once for enjoyment and once to see how the wheels go round.’ Agatha Christie was at a peak.

  Hercule Poirot remains untouched, however. He never faces the complications of sharing his life with anyone and never changes to accommodate it. Christie puts romance at the heart of her plot, but not in the heart of her sleuth. To her, the novel of social manners was another genre. The most she expected of her principal characters was that they seemed ‘real and alive’, and this is what she felt she had done with aplomb in Death on the Nile. She also cleverly evoked the Middle East. Christie shared Ngaio’s passion for travel and her most interesting settings were taken from her real-life experiences. ‘To Sybil Burnett who also loves wandering the world’ she wrote in the dedication to Death on the Nile.

  Writing was a portable occupation that an upper-middle-class wife could do while she accompanied her husband. Remarkably, Christie always saw Mallowan’s profession as an archaeologist as more important than her own as a writer. She was openly mercenary about what she did: she wrote now to make money. Mallowan’s archaeological digs were expensive and at times financed from their own pockets. But she believed that her role as a wife was her principal occupation. Perhaps this is why she never floated Hercule Poirot’s paddle steamer with anything more than murder.

  For Ngaio, the English country village had some of the same sense of strangeness that the Nile had for Christie. Overture to Death came out of her time with Nelly Rhodes in the wintry south of England. ‘The upland air was cold after the stuffiness of the car. It smelt of dead leaves and frost.’ Alleyn notes the physical presence of winter as he steps out of the car in the Vale-of-Pen-Cuckoo, just as Ngaio would have noticed it at the tail end of her 1937-38 trip.

  He has been called in to investigate a most unlikely murder, which has occurred at a Pen-Cuckoo fund-raising performance of a well-known West End play. The greying Idris Campanula is called upon at the last moment to stand in as pianist for her aging rival for the vicar’s affection, Eleanor Prentice, who is distraught. The victorious Campanula sits down at the keyboard to begin her pièce de résistance, Rachmaninoff’s ‘Prelude in C.’ She holds her bony left hand in the air. Then down it comes. ‘Pom. Pom. POM. The three familiar pretentious chords.’ Then she puts her left foot on the soft pedal, and it happens.

  The air was blown into splinters of atrocious clamour. For a second nothing existed but noise—hard racketing noise. The hall, suddenly thick with dust, was also thick with a cloud of intolerable sound. And, as the dust fell, so the pandemonium abated and separated into recognisable sources. Women were screaming. Chair legs scraped…the piano hummed like a gigantic top.

  Miss Campanula slumps forward and her face slides down the sheet of music. She has been shot between the eyes by a ‘Heath-Robinson-style-gadget’ rigged inside the piano. It is a childish prank of village bad-boy Georgie Biggins, who has set up an ingenious system of strings and pulleys to fire a water pistol at one of the unsuspecting spinsters. But the murderer has exchanged the child’s water pistol for a Colt 32.

  The tension that holds this English cosy together is ‘jealousy rooted in sex’. Eleanor Prentice is a thin, bloodless, bucktoothed woman of about 49. Idris Campanula, her buxom foe, is a large-framed, hot-flushed, wire-haired woman of equal antiquity. One is sanctimonious, the other arrogant, and they are rampant for the vicar, who holds them at bay with holy conversation which, on one horrible occasion, in a private moment with Idris Campanula, abandons him completely. As the vicar explains to Alleyn, she misunderstands his silence.

  The next moment she was, to be frank, in my arms.
It was without any exception the most awful thing that has ever happened to me. She was sobbing and laughing at the same time. I was in agony. I couldn’t release myself.

  Ngaio knew exactly how awkward that experience could be because she’d had it in the headmistress’s office at St Margaret’s. ‘It’s beastly for you,’ says Alleyn, ‘but I’m sure you should tell me’, and he is right, because this is the trigger for the murder. It is Ngaio’s vivid picture of the sexual tension between two spinsters that gives this novel its bittersweet pull. Although they are caricatures in their grotesqueness, dependent on readers’ internalized misogyny and fear of aging, they are recognizable people. The stalking spinster is easily visualized in Dinah’s words of warning to her young fiancé, Henry. ‘She creeps and creeps, and she’s simply brimful of poison. She’ll drop some of it into our cup of happiness if she can.’

  The critics loved it. ‘Although I would have considerable difficulty in pronouncing Miss Ngaio Marsh’s first name,’ wrote the reviewer for the Daily Mail, ‘I have no difficulty at all in pronouncing her Overture to Death a first-rate murder novel thoroughly justifying its selection by the Crime Club.’ The critic for the Irish Independent, writing in June 1939, was equally ecstatic. ‘Ingenuity is only one of the author’s assets.’

  She draws very clearly the characters of the half-dozen members of the village ‘upper ten’ who are suspects of the murder. She describes the procedure of police investigation as authentically as if she had served for years in the detective branch of a police force. Above all, she seems a natural storyteller with a gift for concise and dramatic writing. The hall mark of first class is stamped large over this book.