Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime

by Joanne Drayton

  It was an ignominious end to something that had promised and taken so much. Ngaio had worked and sacrificed, and Dan O’Connor had lost money. It would take time for them both to recover. After years of what seemed like an endless summer of successes, Ngaio experienced the winter of failure. There was nothing more to say than goodbye to the players, who mostly returned to England, get into her car and drive home.

  Ngaio returned to the comfort of her old life. Stella Mannings and her husband, who had come down from Tauranga to look after Ngaio’s house while she was away, stayed on for several years with their sons, John and Bear. Both boys had completed their schooling at Christ’s College, and John had had a year at university before deciding he wanted to join the British Army; Bear chose the New Zealand Air Force. Ngaio used her contacts to help John get his wish and organized a farewell cocktail party for him and Bear at Marton Cottage. John, Bear and a friend called Snowy were responsible for serving drinks, but somehow the instructions went astray. John remembers the event well:

  The first rounds [of drinks] were neat, really solid…that relaxed them and then you watered them down a bit [with soda]…that was the thing [Ngaio] always did…something really solid at the beginning to get things going and then ease off…but it was the people who were there like the Bishop of Christchurch…and the Dean…who got completely plastered…they left and it was a very dark night and they somehow got down the stairs and they lost each other, one went down the drive, and the other the path, and there was a hedge in between them so they couldn’t see each other…

  ‘Dean, where are you?’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Yes, but where’s here?’…

  It was pitch black and they didn’t know whether one was behind or in front of the other.

  ‘Dean, who’s taking Communion tomorrow.?’

  ‘You are, my Lord.’

  ‘Dean, I think it would be a good thing for you to take Communion tomorrow’

  ‘But Bishop, people are coming just to hear you.’

  The Dean was found later in a heap under a bush in the garden.

  One of the ladies woke up semi-naked on the floor in a room with a telephone still in her hand…Somebody, I can’t remember who, just slumped on to the floor and people stepped over her, as if that was natural and normal, to talk to somebody else…It was quite a party…We were supposed to add soda but…it all happened suddenly…as far as Ngaio knew it had been diluted.

  Ngaio watched in horror as distinguished guests dropped like flies from the effects of alcohol. When she discovered the reason she was ‘furious’, but some years later ‘she thought it was terribly funny’. In spite of the pitfalls of having two young men around, Ngaio was sorry to see the boys leave for overseas. ‘They were immensely companionable and I think I may say that a bond, already established, was greatly strengthened during the three years that followed my home-coming.’

  Early in 1953, Ngaio drove up to Auckland with Sylvia Fox especially to see the opening night of a Royal Stratford-upon-Avon season of Othello, As You Like It and Henry IV, Part I with Anthony Quayle (whom she knew), Leo McKern and Barbara Jefford. While she was there, she received the tragic news that, on Friday, 13 February, the Little Theatre had been gutted by fire. The wiring was blamed, but the blaze seemed to have started in the roof where the wardrobe was stored. Students smoked cigarettes in the area, which contained felt tunics painted in oil paint, and in summer, under a hot slate roof, this was a highly combustible combination. There were numerous possible causes, but the result was simply devastating. The fabric of a decade of Ngaio’s work with student players was destroyed. Almost all of the costumes, scenery, props, lighting equipment, storage boxes, programmes, photographs and records were burnt. The evidence of so many wonderful experiences had gone forever.

  What phrases, what jetting sounds went roaring up that night: Othello’s opulent agony, the ghost’s booming expostulations, wings in the rooky wood, Clytemnestra’s death cries, Puck’s laughter…What a bonfire!

  The cradle of Ngaio’s theatrical dreams had gone, but characteristically she was not defeated. In November 1952 she produced Christopher Fry’s A Sleep of Prisoners, and a few weeks later announced that the drama society would produce Julius Caesar in July.

  The only accommodation the university could offer was the Great Hall: a cavernous wooden Victorian Gothic space that would drown the intimacy of theatre. Ngaio made her plans, which included the model for a structure within a structure, to be made by the New Zealand Army: a scaffolding auditorium was constructed around three sides of a temporary stage. This was the closest thing audiences had seen to an Elizabethan-style Globe Theatre in New Zealand. In the centre of her makeshift seating was a stage that was equally unique. She and sculptor Tom Taylor worked on the set design. The stage rose powerfully from the hall floor through three levels to a tower connected by a dramatic spiral staircase. The stage revolved, and the plan was to project the action upwards, to enhance the flow and speed of scene changes. It was a daring move, and one that captured the respect of critics and commentators.

  Ngaio used the limitations of the space to enhance the play’s dramatic impact. She had actors coming onto the stage from between the seats, and crowd scenes that mixed riotously with the audience. Rather than togas, the costumes were Italian Fascist uniforms. Julius Caesar had the immediacy of her modern-dress Hamlet, for similar reasons. War shortages had affected the earlier production; now it was dearth caused by fire.

  At the end of the production, like Caesar, perhaps Ngaio glimpsed her future from the top of the tower. She had not achieved the national theatre she had hoped might come out of the Commonwealth players, and now the hub of the drama society had burnt down: ‘We were in the wilderness.’ What remained were her resources of experience and leadership, and these she would use. For the next 15 years Ngaio and her players were in a kind of exile. Rumblings about how the Great Hall was left after the scaffolding, stage and wiring were removed meant that they were never offered the space again. There was a regrouping. From now on, if the players produced avant-garde or contemporary theatre they found their own premises and sponsorship, and when Ngaio was in New Zealand she produced Shakespeare somewhere else. Julius Caesar was a turning point. It re-established her reputation as an innovator, it was a box-office success, and it rekindled her confidence and desire to see Shakespeare produced annually in Christchurch.

  Ngaio moved quickly to complete her 17th novel before rehearsals began for Julius Caesar. Spinsters in Jeopardy was published in Boston in 1953, London in 1954, and as The Bride of Death in New York in 1955. After her theatre commitments were completed for the year, she began work on Scales of Justice, a novel commissioned by Collins to celebrate 25 years of its Crime Club label. Ngaio knew it needed to be good because of its significance. As she collected her thoughts, she contemplated the message of George Orwell’s now famous essay on the ‘Decline of the English Murder’, published in 1946. Orwell began his treatise with the image of a patriarch, full of Sunday roast, settled on his sofa, with a cup of ‘mahogany-brown’ tea, reading the News of the World. His wife dozes in an armchair near the fire, the children are out for a walk, and what does he choose to read about but murder. Orwell argued that the murders which made books sell, and were rehashed in Sunday newspapers, followed a domestic pattern and were inspired typically by middle-class motives—sex, money, jealousy—and, of course, gaining social position or protecting one’s position from scandal. These cases included the great poisoners like Dr Crippen, Dr William Palmer of Rugeley, Dr Thomas Neill Cream, and Mrs Florence Maybrick. These narratives were intriguing because the middle classes could relate to them and read about murder instead of committing it.

  What disturbed Orwell was his detection of a new kind of killing. The Cleft Chin Murder, for instance, was a case where two people randomly thrown together maimed and murdered unknown people for no particular reason. ‘The background was not domesticity, but the anonymous life of…dance-halls, m
ovie-palaces, cheap perfume, false names and stolen cars.’ How could this be memorable or pleasurable for a patriarch to read about? This was the kind of hard-boiled detective fiction that writers had been contemplating since the mid-1920s, a sub-genre that took the ambiguities and random violence of working-class street life and made stories that did not fit the tidy patterns of the Golden Age. It began with the work of Carroll John Daly and was refined in the writing of Raymond Chandler who, with Dashiell Hammett, became one of the great exponents of the American school. Philip Marlowe, Chandler’s tough-talking, street-wise, stunt-pulling private eye, with the hint of a sensitive side, was the antithesis of the aristocratic super-sleuth. Chandler’s commentaries on detective fiction such as ‘The simple art of murder’ (1944) were in part an advocacy of his own style, which he saw as more relevant to modern life.

  Collins’s Crime Club list had been dominated by the greats of the Golden Age, and a revolution, especially from Ngaio, was out of the question, but the old clichés would not stand and the challenge was to inject freshness into an iconic form. The story needed to be classic, but not rigid. So Ngaio began cogitating a fishy tale fit for Collins’s ‘silver-wedding’, as the New Statesman called it. She had Scales of Justice half finished when she received an invitation from her friend Essie Malone to join her in a trip to England on a Norwegian wool freighter called the Temeraire, out of Adelaide and bound for the Russian harbour town of Odessa. Ngaio had been thinking of going away, and she liked the novelty of this unconventional mode of transport because, apart from Essie Malone and her, there were only 10 other passengers. In total there were 63 on board, including the crew. There was only a small passengers’ common room with a bit of deck outside, a small games deck, and a narrow promenade. Their only other outdoor accommodation apart from this was hatch covers, on which they lay or sat.

  This mixture of isolation and an odd degree of intimacy appealed to Ngaio. ‘As soon as we were shown our cabins I knew I would like the Temeraire. She was old-fashioned, odd and good.’ Ngaio enjoyed the soft-hearted Norwegian captain, who cried when he made birthday speeches and toasts to the English Queen. The people onboard and the ship itself became the material for Singing in the Shrouds. The concept of a few passengers travelling for weeks on a cargo vessel with a killer must have occurred to her as she moved around the ship or sat sunning herself on a hatch cover. She would brew the idea, but in the meantime she worked on her current novel. ‘Essie had agreed to act as secretary for the duration,’ she wrote in Black Beech, ‘and we used often to work in the evenings at my current book: Scales of Justice.’

  Ngaio was especially keen to see Odessa. She had arranged for a special visa and was looking forward to seeing the opera house. In the few years she had been back in Christchurch since her Commonwealth tour she had become increasingly involved with two Estonian immigrants, Vladimir or Val Muling and his wife, Anita. This was a ‘new friendship-of-three’ that rapidly assumed a great significance. They had talked animatedly into the early hours of Russia and its culture, and in Odessa Ngaio hoped to bring these conversations to life.

  Instead, the Temeraire sailed into an Iron Curtain that had been made chillier by the Cold War. The ship and its passengers were searched and searched again. Ngaio was instructed to stay in her cabin to await customs officials. She was anxious for herself and the other passengers, and there was the book. It had been typed in triplicate. Would it be seized? Should she hide it? When the officers arrived, the experience was less sinister than she had anticipated, but while they were at anchor in the port they were never allowed to leave the ship. It was frustrating. For 12 days the Temeraire unloaded wool, and all she saw of the Great Russian Bear was a few bedraggled soldiers guarding the wharf. The passengers were flooded with relief when an official put their passports on the table and the ship was free to go.

  They continued on to Spain, and then to a port in Wales where Bob Stead met them and drove them to London. Ngaio took a ‘minute but beguiling house in Hans Road’, three streets over from Beauchamp Place, off Brompton Road. This was her Knightsbridge neighbourhood again, and she adored it. She shopped for her groceries at Harrod’s, saw Shakespearian plays at Stratford-upon-Avon and West End theatre, caught up with old friends like Pamela Mann and the younger generation of Rhodeses, and delivered Scales of Justice to her publisher.

  Scales of Justice was edited through 1954, and came out in Britain and the United States in 1955. Ngaio had decided to celebrate the Crime Club’s silver anniversary with an undiluted English cosy. The book was dedicated to her much-loved cousin Stella Mannings, who had typed sections of it, and in spite of its rural English setting it contained snatches of Ngaio and her private world. Nurse Kettle pushes her bike up to the top of Watt’s Hill and surveys the pretty village of Swevenings with its meandering trout stream, trees, gardens, lanes, hedges, golf course, stately home, and quiet country cottages dripping with summer roses. She is one of a handful of brilliantly sketched characters. Another is the slightly soft-in-the-head cat fancier Octavius Danberry-Phinn, who is convinced that his feline family of nine are human (or perhaps, better). Ngaio adored cats herself. ‘Just a scribble to give you my most heartfelt sympathy on the loss of dear Chris S,’ she wrote to a friend on the death of her cat. ‘It really is shattering when they reach their little span & the blackness that follows can only be understood by the true catty-fan…she was indeed a most exceptional person & you will find it hard to think of a successor.’ Octavius Phinn’s Thomasina Twitchett had a real-life namesake in Ngaio’s portly tortoiseshell Tom Twitchet, who was being cared for at Marton Cottage by house-sitting friends Helen and Lyall Holmes. In the novel, one of Thomasina’s progeny is a young male called Ptolemy.

  Octavius Phinn’s cats are an integral part of a plot based on the premise ‘that the scales of no two trout are alike: I mean, microscopically alike in the sense that no two sets of fingerprints correspond’. Colonel Cartarette published this fact in his treatise, The Scaly Breed. He is the murder victim and, with the assistance of Roderick Alleyn and Thomasina Twitchett, it is this little-known scaly fact that helps to catch his killer.

  Alleyn is brought into the case by Lady Lacklander, because she is concerned that her family’s dark Nazi spy secret may be revealed to someone other than a ‘gent’. Her husband, a traitor, in the topmost echelons of the Foreign Office, was responsible for the suicide of Ludovic Phinn, Octavius’s son. The death of his only child, and his wife’s of a broken heart soon afterwards, sent Octavius catty. The class system inevitably rears its cosy head in Scales of Justice, but it is modified. Kitty Cartarette, the colonel’s unfortunate choice of a second wife, calls the snobs in Swevenings ‘survivals from the Ice Age’. And when Lady Lacklander hypocritically says of Kitty Cartarette, ‘You never know with that sort of people what they may do’, Alleyn curtly replies, ‘Nor with other sorts either, it seems.’

  Many reviews were ecstatic. ‘Excellently characterised English village murder mystery,’ wrote the reviewer for The Observer in May 1955. ‘Miss Marsh’s best yet, I do believe. No-body is caricatured, not even the District Nurse; yet everybody is full of quirks…’ The murder of the ‘nice colonel’ was ‘pleasantly delayed’ and there was a ‘good surprise solution’. The Sunday Times agreed:

  Miss Ngaio Marsh might be said to be now occupying the throne regrettably vacated by Miss Dorothy L. Sayers, in that she brings the true detective story closer to the straightforward novel than any other woman writer. Her work, in fact, is as nearly flawless as makes no odds. Character, plot, wit, good writing, sound technique: all are there, together with the final requirement of the detective-story writer, ability to bamboozle the reader.

  This high praise was followed in 1956 by a special honour awarded on the strength of the new novel’s popularity. Ngaio was back in New Zealand when it was bestowed, so Collins Crime Club editor George Hardinge sent it to her with a memo in December:

  I am forwarding herewith the ‘Scroll’ awarded to you as a
result of the ballot organised by the Crime Writers Association and the Daily Mail. This should have been presented to you at an immense banquet at the Piccadilly Hotel, but was accepted by Mr Smith on your behalf in your absence. All is going well with OFF WITH HIS HEAD.

  Ngaio began Off With His Head while she was living in Hans Road. Its inspiration was a freezing winter trip to stay with the Rhodeses who were living in the Kent village of Birling. Where Scales of Justice had been a light summery tale of angling assassination, Off With His Head was a chilling story of murder among Morris dancers in the village of Mardian.

  At the book’s beginning, the door is opened to a frozen world. ‘The two Mardians were mentioned in the press and on the air as being the coldest spots in England.’ It is four o’clock on the afternoon of the winter solstice. Snow and frost lie deep and impenetrable on the ground. The trees are shuddering in the north wind as middle-aged Mrs Bünz’s tiny car makes its way through the bleakness. She is swaddled in homespun wool and wooden beads. ‘Mrs Bünz was the lady who sits near the front of lectures and always asks questions…She weaves, forms circles, gives talks, handthrows pots and designs book-plates.’ She is a fanatic folklorist in search of one of the richest remnants of pure pagan ritual left in England. In the distance, on a white hillside, she can see the ruins of an ancient Norman castle partly encircling a hideous Victorian mansion. This is where the Mardian Morris Dance of the Five Sons will take place. It is a fertility rite of death and resurrection handed down through generations of Andersens, who have been Mardian smithies as far back as human memory can recall.

  Off With His Head is a cleverly written cosy that uses ancient English folklore as the fabric of a fabulous homicide: the old Guiser Andersen from the smithy, who plays the fool in the Mardian Morris Dance with his five sons, is found decapitated at the end of the solstice ceremony. To strains of traditional violin music, in full public view, he dances around the dolmen stone, on which he then lays his head. According to legend, the old fool had five sons among whom he divided his property and then they killed him. In the Mardian dance, the fool’s five sons symbolically sever his head, and later he is miraculously restored to life. Dancing with the fool and his sons are ‘Crack’, a hermaphrodite man-woman figure in skirted dress, and ‘Betty’, an equine monster costumed in metal hammered at the forge. Both are personifications of fertility who chase onlookers, tagging them with brushes dipped in liquid tar.