Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime

by Joanne Drayton

  Jonathan Royal’s dinner party is a dogfight. As he dresses, Aubrey Mandrake wonders where Jonathan will place his guests at the table. On sheets of Highfold notepaper he tries to work out a seating order that will keep the most acrimonious apart, but it is impossible. Jonathan Royal, on the other hand, has set himself the completely different task of devising a seating plan that will create the greatest friction. He has ‘the long dining-table…replaced by a round one’, then threads the enemies together one after another like beads on a necklace. There are just two seats left, which belong to the last guests to arrive. ‘Both were extremely pale and, when they found their place-cards, seemed to flinch all over: “Like agitated horses,” thought Mandrake.’ Jonathan has also carefully judged the alcohol requirements of some of his guests, but intoxicates others. The best part of the evening for all of them, except Jonathan, is bed.

  The next day, a case of mistaken identity results in Aubrey Mandrake being pushed into the swimming pool. In any other season but deepest winter this might not have been a problem, but the club-footed Aubrey is pulled from the water bedraggled and hypothermic. It begins to snow unrelentingly: a quiet, insidious build-up of impenetrable white. There is a murderer at large at Highfold Manor and the house party is snowbound. It is ‘a brilliantly constructed plot. Fear dogs the footsteps of the guests until one of them is murdered. Terror creates the dramatic tension that makes this novel such a success.

  In the United States, the consensus was that this was an exceptional novel. Kay Irwin, writing for The New York Times, was the most perceptive in her assessment of strengths and weaknesses:

  Although the puzzle is intricate, the appeal of Death and the Dancing Footman is almost as much that of a novel as of a murder mystery. The movement of the plot is deliberate at the beginning and rather arbitrarily slowed down at the end. But the interest of character is brilliant and unflagging, both incident and conversation are alive with wit.

  The artificial slowing-down in the plot is caused by the arrival of Alleyn. Slow, plodding police detection kills the suspense and pace which make the beginning of the novel so engrossing.

  Alleyn would arrive late in many of Ngaio’s future novels. The fascinating way she developed her characters in the lead-up to his entrance would leave commentators wondering whether the detective element was even necessary. What impressed her critics most was not the relentless interrogation of the puzzle plot by the super-sleuth, but the canvas of human foibles and frailties against which it was played out. Her ambition to write crime fiction that doubled as a novel of manners left her characters free to take on a life of their own, and sometimes they became so interesting that they challenged the detective’s domination. Because her literary ambitions were contrary to the essential precepts of the genre, tension developed between the life of the early part of the novel and what came after Alleyn’s arrival. Some critics found this division so extreme that they described her novels as containing two separate books.

  In England, critics widely acclaimed the novel’s cleverness. The reviewer for The Observer applauded ‘the prolonged suspense over who is going to be the victim’ and the ‘good surprise finish’, which was ‘based on a complicated but neat alibi system’. In a book that was ‘lively and entertaining’, the ‘ultra rational motives’ compensated for the ‘heavily artificial situation’. The Tatler described it as a ‘detective novel, not [a] detective story. Her Death and the Dancing Footman is a fit and not disappointing successor to her brilliant Surfeit of Lampreys—can I say more?’

  But there was also the faintest note of negative criticism. Some commentators were beginning to find the cosy tired and limiting. ‘We have met this setting before,’ wrote the Sunday Times critic; ‘there are no characters to command our affections and no places to make us linger over the view,’ said The Times Literary Supplement. It was not that Ngaio had failed—it was that the Golden Age detective novel was beginning to lose its power. In 1944, American detective novelist Raymond Chandler would write his famous criticism of crime detective fiction for The Atlantic Monthly. He debunked A.A. Milne’s The Red House Mystery and E.C. Bentley’s seminal Trent’s Last Case, but his most cutting criticism was saved for the Queens of Crime, Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.

  In the introduction to her Omnibus of Crime, Sayers had made a distinction between ‘literature of escape’ and the more lofty ‘literature of expression’. She believed that the conventions of crime detective fiction made them mutually exclusive. Chandler, who represented a new form of detective fiction writing, was incensed: ‘there are no dull subjects, only dull writers,’ he jeered. ‘I think what was really gnawing at Miss Sayers’ mind was the slow realisation that her kind of detective story was an arid formula which could not even satisfy its own implications.’ He saw stereotypical characters and plots as more dead than their victims. ‘It is the same careful grouping of suspects, the same utterly incomprehensible trick of how somebody stabbed Mrs. Pottington Postlethwaite III with the solid platinum poignard just as she flatted on the top note of the “Bell Song” from Lakmé in the presence of fifteen ill-assorted guests.’ Ngaio was not specifically mentioned in the article, but this was certainly a reference to her plots. ‘The English,’ he concluded, ‘may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.’ Chandler advocated the new style of ‘hard-boiled’ authors like American Dashiell Hammett. This writing, he claimed, was authentic because it was based on fact. ‘Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley,’ he announced. His novels were about realistic crime and the realistic people who committed it. It was frugal and his scenes ‘seemed never to have been written before’. Aficionados would have recognized the validity of what Chandler s aid, but they would also have known that he was a disaffected English-born writer of the hard-boiled school and, therefore, not exactly objective.

  The war that played a cursory role in Death of the Dancing Footman was more immediately present in Ngaio’s real life. She donned a uniform and fortnightly drove a Red Cross transport bus that ferried wounded soldiers home from Lyttelton. Feeling New Zealand’s isolation and her own helplessness to make a contribution to the war effort, Ngaio thought that this was the least she could do. She was intensely patriotic, as was her father. As soon as he recovered from a life-threatening perforated appendix operation, he joined the Home Guard and ‘ran about the hills hurling hand grenades and throwing himself flat on his face until his doctor forbade it’. After that, an abortive attempt at making camouflage nets ended in his falling out with the authorities over the type of knot he used, and he spent much of the rest of the time digging and perfecting a ‘funk-hole’ in their garden. His brush with death was sobering for Ngaio. ‘I could see, to my terror, that everybody except Sir Hugh [Acland] expected my father to die’, and the thought was too awful to contemplate. Henry Marsh played tennis until he was 80 years old, and Ngaio kept his mind and interest in life alive by involving him in her productions. ‘He played two small character parts…I used to walk round the set every night just before his entrance and there he would be, listening, with his ear at the door, for his cue.’ Their eyes would meet, they would share a knowing glance and he would walk onto the stage.

  Ngaio’s knowledge of New Zealand and her patriotic zeal made her an ideal choice to write the New Zealand title of ‘The British Commonwealth in Pictures’ series, put out by Collins in 1942. She co-authored it with historian R.M. Burden, but the text was unmistakably hers.

  A key ambition of the project was to affirm New Zealand’s link to the Commonwealth united in war against Germany. ‘Why have they left their small farms, their shops, their offices, and their native villages?’ she wrote of the thousands of New Zealanders who had enlisted. ‘It seems that one must say of these young men that they are about to fight for an ideal, and that this ideal is freedom, the freedom of a commonwealth of nations.’ Apart from its jingoistic purpose, the publication was also designed to dish u
p a slice of New Zealand to a principally British audience. It began with a look at the ‘New Zealand people’, Pakeha and Maori, then considered ‘Social and Political’ policy, gave a brief ‘Survey of New Zealand History’, and ended with a look at ‘The Landscape’ in the North and South Islands. This was achieved in just 48 heavily illustrated pages. It was a book written for the lay reader, offering personal perspectives highly coloured by the colonial attitudes of the time:

  When white-skinned men came to this country they found a people living in a Stone Age. To-day the Maori has so far assimilated our ways that members of his race are to be found in most professions and trades in New Zealand. This process of acquiring in a century habits and usages which the white man has taken a thousand years to develop, may be likened to forcible feeding, and it is not surprising if at times the Maori has suffered from a sort of evolutionary indigestion.

  Ngaio’s view was that of colonizing Pakeha, who justified the appropriation of Maori land and culture by seeing themselves as humane usurpers. ‘The strong have dispossessed the weak either violently or peacefully,’ she wrote. ‘But seldom in history have the conquerors shown such concern for the welfare and perpetuation of the conquered race.’ This was the Euro-centric cliché trotted out by many liberal Pakeha New Zealanders in the 1940s and 1950s. More conservative Pakeha attitudes were worse.

  Ngaio saw the country as young, in terms of European settlement, when the clock arrived and Pakeha time began. When she spoke of the people generally, she spoke of Pakeha. ‘In some ways New Zealanders are still mid-Victorian Englishmen of good heart,’ she wrote of a population she described as the most homogeneous of any British colony. Her long-term prognosis was that Pakeha and Maori would inter-marry until they became indistinguishable. She saw New Zealand as being in a time warp created by the county’s far-flung isolation from the land of its European conquerors. ‘New Zealand stands like a cranky little coda, at the bottom of the world. Its isolation is extreme.’ Her New Zealand was a white male world where women, deprived of leisure, were the harassed helpmeets of the runholders, cockies, stock and station agents, and small businessmen who made up the backbone of the country.

  Today, this mainstream piece of feel-good propaganda for New Zealand and the war effort may seem bigoted and contrived. It stands as a record of its time, but if anything redeems it, it is Ngaio’s love of New Zealand and her anachronistically slanted, but nevertheless absolute, commitment to biculturalism. She respected Maori, and was pressingly aware of the huge price they had paid for colonization. This was a constant theme in her New Zealand-based fiction. Her affection for her country was based on her love of the land. New Zealand may not have restaurants as good as those of English or American department stores, or thermal regions as dramatic as Yellowstone, or alpine vistas as picturesque as Austria and Switzerland,

  but Pohutukawa trees grow above bays of enchantment only in New Zealand, and nowhere else have I found an equivalent to the clear spaciousness of our mountain plateaux, or heard bird song as deep and moving as that of the New Zealand bush. This is a country so young that it impinges on the very ancient, and its clear and primordial landscape reaches back to emotions that have nothing to do with civilisation, but its spell—once felt—is not easily forgotten.

  These emotions reached back to her childhood, when she was overwhelmed by the presence of the bush. In the summer of 1912, when she was still at high school, her parents and a group of friends made the long trip to Glentui in the foothills of the Southern Alps. They caught a train from Christchurch to Rangiora, then another along a branch line to Oxford. There in the sweltering heat they lunched at a pub, then picked up two horse-drawn farm carts loaded with stores and camping equipment. It was an 8-mile (13-kilometre) amble among hills and across the Ashley River to Glentui, where they went up the valley to find a campsite.

  The carts juddered over the rough track while younger members of the party raced ahead to find the ideal clearing among native beech trees. The men cut manuka tent poles, Ngaio’s mother cooked in a camp oven ingeniously rigged up by Cecil Walker, and Ngaio collected water in a ‘clanking Kerosenetin bucket’ from a river that lulled them to sleep at night in their hay-stuffed sleeping sacks. Bellbirds were the soloists in a magnificent dawn chorus of birds. Ngaio woke early and was flooded by a sense of ecstasy. This was a defining moment of youthful rapture. ‘I experienced…absolute happiness: bliss.’ And she shared the emotion with someone special. ‘My father was magnificent on these occasions. He was in his natural element and seemed to give off a glow of profound satisfaction.’ There were others, too, whom she enjoyed: her actor friends the Burtons, plus Aileen’s and Helen’s fiancés; her friend Sylvia Fox; and Dundas Walker and his brother Cecil. Her world of intimate association was complete.

  During blazing hot days of dazzling sunlight, they revived in the chill mountain waters of a swimming-hole they made by damming the river. In the seclusion of their private beech-fringed glade, ‘the girls could rid themselves of their neck-to-knee bathing clothes’ and swim and exult in the soft ‘springing pleasure of young grass’ as they sunbathed. ‘One day we climbed the mountain to Blowhard and looked across a great valley into the backcountry: range after naked range with a glittering of snow on the big tops. “My country,” I thought.’

  In this landscape Ngaio felt a connection and a sense of belonging that was never extinguished. England was the home of her ancestors, but New Zealand was her turangawaewae. The land of her birth always drew her back. Like many Pakeha—or ‘newcomers’, as she called them—she felt the dilemma of protest against and disillusionment with the Old World, of a truncated history, of the anomalies of colonization and land ownership. ‘I do not know if other New Zealanders are visited by this contradictory feeling of belonging and not-belonging, ’ she wrote in Black Beech, ‘but it came upon me very vividly when I first looked into the high-country from the top of Blowhard and it has returned many times since then. It is a feeling that deepens rather than modifies one’s attachment to New Zealand.’

  The Burton girls’ fiancés were both Anglican curates, and on Christmas Day at Glentui they celebrated Holy Communion at dawn. Henry Marsh, the ardent atheist, spent Christmas Eve fashioning an altar made out of manuka poles in a clearing by the river. Ngaio was at her religious zenith and probably still smarting from the loss of a confirmation cross and chain which had been spirited away from her tent by a thieving weka who crept across sleeping bodies to steal it. Henry, who allowed each individual their belief, built the altar for his daughter. He carefully positioned the structure between two trees so that the sun would rise behind it, but was not present at the service the next day. He was magnanimous again later, when one of the Burton fiancés, a union supporter, was involved in the Waterfront Strike of 1913 and Henry was a government- appointed special constable. He was conservative in his political principles, yet he let others have theirs. The Marsh family enjoyed several more Christmas camping holidays at Glentui before Ngaio left school and her friends drifted off like dandelion seeds on a gust of autumn wind. It was natural that they would go their own ways, but Dundas Walker and Sylvia Fox would remain constant throughout Ngaio’s life.

  Glentui formed part of the backdrop to Ngaio’s writing in New Zealand, but other outdoor experiences were equally charged. The book included 12 colour plates of landscape paintings documenting New Zealand’s settlement and scenery, from Captain Cook Arriving at Queen Charlotte’s Sound, February 10th, 1777 (by J. Clevely) to Elizabeth Wallwork’s more recent Wind in the Larches. Ngaio included two of her own mountain landscapes, and one by her friend Olivia Spencer Bower. It was the borrowing of the Wallwork painting that would have brought back a host of memories. Elizabeth and Richard Wallwork had been Ngaio’s teachers at Canterbury College. Richard was the life-room lecturer, but he and his wife were also devotees of landscape painting, and part of a wider Canterbury School who selected raw, often South Canterbury vistas of rivers, rolling plains and mountains as their sub
ject matter. The more progressive painters sought to convey the arid bones of the landscape in simple dramatic forms. They shunned the picturesque and the iconic in favour of the simple and the ordinary: the quiet railway siding, the isolated mountain hut, the meandering shingle road crossed by a ramshackle bridge. The human scale was insignificant. Ngaio expressed it perfectly: ‘our presence here was no more than a cobweb across the hide of a monster’. These were subjects that visualized how it felt to be overpowered by Nature. The artists of the Canterbury School painted outdoors in front of the subjects that inspired them. The itinerant camping life, the sand in the oils, the mosquitoes in the watercolour water were all part of the ritual. Their landscapes were a groping, instinctive statement of nationalism.

  After she had been at art school for a year, Richard and Elizabeth Wallwork invited Ngaio, her mother and a young cousin on a painting trip to the West Coast. This was the rich, dark, brooding, primordial balance to the dry, open plains of the east. Their train left at 8am, and by noon foothills loomed on either side and they were climbing, hurtling through scree and tussock until they reached the mountain tunnels. Ngaio and her cousin stood outside in the blackness as the platform surged and bucked beneath their feet. Sooty cinders burned their lungs and the noise of the train in the tunnel was deafening, but they were exhilarated. The railway line stopped at Arthur’s Pass, so the final stage was taken by road. Their party was among the last to take a Cobb and Co. Royal Mail Coach, before the Otira Tunnel was opened in 1923. Women sat inside the coach and men on the top, but Ngaio slipped past convention and climbed up into the box seat.

  We were plunged into a region of wet forest and dark mountains. We looked into a chasm where treetops were no bigger than green fungi…It opens with a series of hairpin bends. I am badly affected with height vertigo…On the outside seat one seemed, literally, to overhang the edge. I gripped a ridiculously small curved rail…Nobody spoke. From time to time the brakes screamed and stank.