Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime

by Joanne Drayton

  When the time comes for the fool to stand up, nothing happens, and the Guiser’s lifeless body is discovered behind the stone, with his head some feet away in a bloodied paper mask. His death shocks the small community. Everyone is involved in the event. The doctor plays the violin; the storekeeper is ‘Betty’; the vicar’s son, and heir of Mardian Castle, is ‘Crack’. And this has been the pattern for centuries: the Mardian Morris Dance is an ageless ritual of unification in which classes meet and are galvanized in the heat of a midwinter bonfire. Ngaio’s characterization is superb, and her knowledge of English folklore and dance is reinforced by meticulous research. The mystery of the decapitation whodunit is preserved cleverly to the end.

  In a review of Scales of Justice published in the New Statesman, the critic wrote: ‘Miss Marsh’s style does not please everyone…and her books are often heavily loaded with crudely snobbish class-consciousness. But given the right plot, her workmanship can be magnificent.’ This critic liked Scales of Justice and for the same reason would have endorsed Off With His Head, because Ngaio observed the nuances of the British class system with a critical eye. If she was blinded in places by Anglophile admiration in her earlier novels, after the war she became more searching. In Off With His Head, aging representatives of the class system are archaic:

  To Dame Alice…class was unremarkable and existed in the way that continents and races exist. Its distinctions were not a matter of preference but of fact. To play at being of one class when you were actually of another was as pointless as it would be for a Chinese to try and pass himself off as a Zulu.

  She is 94 years old, and like the Guiser, one of the ‘survivals from the Ice Age’. The younger generation is different. It is Dame Alice’s great-great-nephew and heir Ralph, who is set to marry the Guiser’s granddaughter Camilla, who will ensure that future fertility dances take on a new aspect.

  Ngaio worked on Off With His Head through the bitter English winter of 1954-55. Her next book, Singing in the Shrouds, consolidated her journey to England on the Temeraire and her trip home. It was begun in February 1956, on the boat back to New Zealand. She imagined what it would be like departing the Thames on a cargo freighter with a serial killer among its nine passengers. ‘Silly cows,’ the taxi driver mutters to PC Moir. He has waited an eternity on the wharf in the blackness and fog for his fare to come back. She is a shop girl with a huge box of hyacinths that she is delivering to celebrity Mrs Dillington-Blick, who is boarding the Cape Farewell. The flower girl never returns, and he steams in his taxi, as the night grows longer and colder.

  It is almost midnight when PC Moir decides to look for the taxi’s mysterious fare. There are many dark corners and cupboards of blackness along the wharf. Packing cases, dumps of equipment and cargo, piles of ropes and rotting canvas take on sinister form as he flashes his lamp over them. A rat scuttles across his boot and he starts. The light from his lamp lurches haphazardly along an alleyway, catching suddenly in its beam a ‘high-heeled shoe with a foot in it’. The shaft of light ‘crept from the foot along a leg…and came to rest at last on a litter of artificial pearls and fresh flowers scattered over the breast of a dead girl’. In her hand she clutches the tiniest shred of evidence, the torn corner of an embarkation card, which leads Roderick Alleyn—who in the fictional space between Scales of Justice and Off With His Head has been promoted to superintendent—to believe a serial killer is aboard the Cape Farewell. He joins the ship by pilot cutter after it has set sail.

  This was Ngaio’s first book with a serial killer, so it involved a new type of murderer with a different pathology. The killing could appear random, because the pattern existed in the murderer’s mind and modus operandi. ‘These sorts of criminals are often our worst headache,’ Alleyn explains to two shipboard confidantes.

  They have no occupational habits. They resemble each other only in their desire to kill for gratification. In everyday life they may be anything: there are no outwards signs…The thing one looks for, of course, is a departure from routine. If there’s no known routine, if your man is a solitary creature as Jack the Ripper was, your chances lessen considerably.

  The serial killer in Singing in the Shrouds has a routine, which is to strangle a victim every 10 days, while singing strains of songs and leaving a shower of flower petals over the victim. This is the killer’s fingerprint that Alleyn works out, but not before a fourth murder has been committed.

  Ngaio’s real life and writing are linked in the novel’s reference to a drunken episode of on-air spoonerisms by the character Aubyn Dale, who is a television talk-show host. ‘He was going all springlike over a display of hyacinths and said that in arranging them all you really needed was a “turdy stable”.’ This relates to a joke Ngaio shared with John Schroder. ‘My Chemist known as Turdy Stable,’ she told him in December 1958, ‘[said] aren’t you a dangerous person to know, Miss Marsh & would you care for our Xmas Calendar (cats in funny hats).’ The chemist had recommended that Ngaio use a ‘turdy stable’ when taking indoor photographs with her Box Brownie and had become thus-named.

  In this same letter, written after her return to New Zealand, Ngaio also appealed to John Schroder for a job for Val Muling.

  Val (Vladimir) is an Esthonian [sic] who was exiled at the age of 19 & has spent the rest of his life in Paris & then in China where he was Commissioner for the Northern (I think) Territory…In Paris he studied the piano under Corteau (?) & played with the Paris Symphony Orchestra…Val speaks some eight languages & is quite astonishingly civilised & the nicest of chaps…He now wonders if by any chance there would be a dogsbody job at 3YA.

  Val would become an arbiter of her detective manuscripts before they were sent off to the publisher, and the Mulings often accompanied her to all-important play rehearsals. They were colleagues in culture and close friends, mentioned in the dedication to Spinsters in Jeopardy. She was intimately connected to both of the Mulings, but her link to Val was perhaps the one she valued the most. When he was charged with soliciting sodomy in a Christchurch park toilet, Ngaio never faltered in her support or affection for him or Anita. Ngaio was never a prude. She accepted sexual diversity as a matter of course.

  A return to Christchurch inevitably signalled a switch for Ngaio from her intense focus on detective novels to involvement in Shakespeare. In August 1956, she produced a season of King Lear at the Civic Theatre. The costumes were elaborate, with brilliantly contrasted heraldic patterns. Her stage set was simple and dramatic, and she used two portable aprons to bring the stage forward, extending the action into the audience to create a sense of intimacy and immediacy. Ngaio hated the venue. ‘This great barn is rather like a theatrical joke in bad taste,’ she wrote in Black Beech. It seated about 1,100 people, which was a huge capacity compared with the Little Theatre.

  This was an ambitious play to tackle with young players. The issues were complex and sophisticated, and not all critics felt the cast had explored all the psychological nuances. But there were some rising stars who would establish themselves as Ngaio’s protégés at home and abroad. There was Mervyn Glue (nicknamed Sticky), a young law graduate who had played Brutus in Julius Caesar and now tackled Lear. Ngaio had groomed him from the early days of Little Theatre productions and he was consistently good. ‘Mervyn Glue’s performance as the King was robust,’ wrote a reviewer, ‘a rash fiery voluntary it was hard to believe that he would ever bend before age or misfortune…even in the broken man this energy was manifest.’

  Annette Facer’s Cordelia was less emphatic. She played her part with ‘grace and scrupulousness’, but with her ‘self-effacing’ grey costume and subdued manner ‘she tended to be lost in the spate of events’. Ngaio’s King of France, Gerald Lascelles, and her Earl of Kent, David Hindin, would become stalwart players, and this was Elric Hooper’s entrée in a major role as the Fool, whom he played to perfection. ‘In his jester’s suit with bells and bauble complete, this fool seemed to embody a spirit from time long past.’ Ngaio had spotted him in student revie
ws and invited him to audition. She could see his potential and that of young Fine Arts student Jonathan Elsom, who played Oswald.

  Ngaio was commended by commentators for her courage in taking on such a difficult play with untested amateurs. ‘No praise can be too high for Miss Marsh’s work as producer,’ wrote one critic, who found in the play ‘moments of pure and perfect beauty…giving an insight into the profoundest depths of drama. Kent in the stocks, or the lecherous Edmund eyeing Regan and Goneril at his first entrance.’ Ngaio had worked tirelessly on preparation for the production. Before opening night, a reporter for The Christchurch Star-Sun visited her at home. ‘On either side of her armchair on two low tables rested her working script of the play, “King Lear”—voluminous notes in loose-leaf folder—and a collection of small dolls, with which she works out the groupings and movements of her actors.’

  Ngaio was as meticulous in her planning for the stage as she was with the research for her novels, and sometimes they overlapped. In Off With His Head, Ngaio had made references and links to Shakespeare’s Lear. ‘I began to see in these ritual dances a distillation of the Lear theme,’ she explained to a reporter, ‘the same characters always cropping up, with the protagonist an old man. All have the idea of resurrection—they are basically fertility dances.’ She was aware of the sexual dynamics of the Lear theme and brought it out in both the book and the play. Off With His Head, which was dedicated to John and Bear Mannings ‘with love’, was released in the United States in 1956 (as Death of a Fool), and in Britain in 1957.

  In July 1957, Ngaio produced her second Henry V. Her stable of leading actors took the key roles again. David Hindin, who had been Kent in Lear, was cast as the King, Elric Hooper as Chorus, Mervyn Glue as the comic Pistol, Jonathan Elsom as the Dauphin, and Annette Facer as Katharine. The show was a spectacle. Ngaio extended the aprons further into the audience, and the blaze of colour, crowd scenes and eruptions of dramatic action were dazzling. ‘Pattern is enhanced and underlined by costume,’ wrote the critic for Canta magazine, ‘and in this production the costumes, designed by Jon Elsom, were superb, conforming to character, identifying the protagonist and gorgeous in colour.’ Wardrobe mistress Doreen Sharp worked evenings and weekends and ran working-bees for months to translate the designs and ‘200 yards of material’ into 43 lavish 15th-century period costumes.

  Hindin played an animated and versatile King: ‘the high point was perhaps his blunt English wooing—slightly burlesqued—of the sophisticated French princess Katharine. Annette Facer was a good foil for his wooing.’ Hooper’s Chorus was judged superb. Glue’s portrayal of Pistol, with his characteristic skinful, was applauded, and Elsom’s ‘effeminate, and much-too-talkative Dauphin…was as subtle, polished, and odious as the role demanded’.

  Reviews of the show were encouraging, but there were some nagging reservations. Not all of the acting was consistent or flowing, and in this patriotic demonstration of heraldic testosterone there was a dearth of women. Maybe this was why Ngaio, the next year, was working on a play with a stronger female lead. She wrote to her friend Lady Doris McIntosh in April 1958, after a particularly nasty tummy bug that was finally ‘clearing up’:

  …just as my students at Canterbury College have decided to do Hamlet after I had done three weeks intensive work on Antony & Cleopatra. It appears that a request has come in from the schools for this play and also from the Arts Faculty within the university, so there is nothing for it but as rapidly as possible to exchange Egypt for Elsinore.

  This was just the beginning of the battle.

  Hamlet was relatively easy to find in the bristling talent of Elric Hooper. ‘My Hamlet…arrived here yesterday at 2 & left at 11 exhausted. He can manage the reflective bits very well but the savage under-tones at the moment elude the boy. Still he’s intelligent & a glutton for punishment so I hope all may be well.’

  Casting a comparable Ophelia, however, was an ordeal. ‘Rehearsals every day—two on Sunday—& a thousand & one crises & upheavals,’ Ngaio told Doris McIntosh.

  …a dearth of Ophelias has been the major worry but at last that one has been settled—not before a lot of time has been squandered in trying to squeeze the part out of a physically suited young lady who wouldn’t be able to give a convincing performance of a deaf mute in the dark.

  The Ophelia she was so thrilled to find was Annette Facer, who, like the rest of Ngaio’s stable, had been warming with each role. Ngaio now plunged into what she described to Doris as the ‘six week maelstrom of production’. Everything was shelved in favour of the production: ‘correspondence, normal human intercourse & personal appearance suffer neglect’. There was also the tyrant in Ngaio that sometimes emerged to shape coarse students into fine players. ‘Can it be true after all that we are the gentler sex? You wouldn’t think so if you could hear me tearing the tights off the wretched footballer who is playing the role of Marcellus.’

  Jonathan Elsom, now in his fourth year of Fine Arts, again designed the set and costumes. He worked closely with Ngaio to ‘familiarise himself with her stage groupings and movements, and ensure that any characters likely to be on the stage together in clashing colours would never be close’. Instead of modern dress, Ngaio chose a Byronic style from the early 1800s. Once again the costuming was sumptuous, with the exception of Hamlet, who was in fitting black. A flurry of promotional activities preceded all of Ngaio’s plays. Bob Scott, who had played Gower in Henry V, was publicity co-ordinator and there were promotional features in the Listener and The Christchurch Star-Sun. A full-page article in the latter introduced a facetious note that would amplify. ‘Here is the recipe for play-acting perfection,’ wrote Norman Scott Forrest.

  Take the University of Canterbury Drama Society, stir in the script of ‘Hamlet’, then give the mixture to wonder-chef Ngaio Marsh to bake into a rich delicacy for Christchurch audiences. The final concoction should be entitled: ‘Ngaio Marsh, as presented by “Hamlet”.’

  Ngaio had become the Garrick of Christchurch theatre, but neither she, nor the play, deserved the lashing they received in the Star-Sun review. The critic was galled by her oedipal reading of the play, and by Hooper’s ‘playing the role as it appeared to have been interpreted for him’. The costuming was effete and lacked nobility, and every actor seemed to have fallen short of their role except Ophelia, whose mad scene was ‘delicate and tragic’.

  The editor of the paper received a flood of irate letters and a retraction was published. Ngaio’s stamp was indelible and pervasive, but she was a tall poppy of talent, ambition and dynamism in a country where jealous egalitarianism was the universal measure. Inevitably, she, and what she did, became targets. Other criticism was positive. The Press reviewer described Hooper’s interpretation of Hamlet as ‘truly artistic’ and ‘highly accomplished’, and Facer’s ‘graceful and touching’ Ophelia as the demonstration of a new level in her acting achievement. Mervyn Glue, David Hindin, Jonathan Elsom and Gerald Lascelles were all commended for their performances, and the costumes and set design deemed ‘a considerable accomplishment by any standard’. In the end, Ngaio was exhausted but pleased, especially with the season’s £200 profit and Hooper’s news that he had won a bursary to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA). He left New Zealand three weeks after Hamlet closed.

  Ngaio had put her three-quarters-finished novel aside to produce the play, and it was hard, after weeks, to come back and pick up the ends. ‘I struggle in a debilitated manner with my book and loathe every word of it,’ she wrote to Doris McIntosh. ‘Can only hope that this reaction is due, as you hearteningly suggest, to the aftermath of the bug.’

  Ngaio was always full of insecurities about her books. Rosemary Greene, her secretary in London during 1949-50, and in New Zealand from 1961, has testified to Ngaio’s lack of confidence in her work. ‘Whenever I posted off the finished typescript to Edmund Cork…or Dorothy Olding…she would be extremely thankful to be rid of it but she would then be in an absolute fever until she heard back t
o know what they thought of it. I used to feel quite disloyal during this waiting period that I wasn’t also in a fever, but I’d seen this so often.’

  When Ngaio began a book she started with a new set of characters and plot. The formula was a framework, but the challenge to be original within it was one she faced anew each time. Like an actor, she considered herself only as good as her last performance. The news about Singing in the Shrouds, published in the United States in 1958 and Britain in 1959, was very encouraging. On 21 January 1959, she received a memo from Richard Simon at Collins. ‘The reviews this book has had are really wonderful. It looks like being the most successful Ngaio Marsh ever.’ A transcript of reviews followed. George Millar of the Daily Express described it as:

  …a book that, within its chosen limitations, is masterly…I admit to being amazed by Miss Marsh, she is astonishingly good. Moments of pure hilarity are perfectly set among moments of delicious fear. Writing, characterisation, even the sea background are as crisp and as welcome as new banknotes.

  Maurice Richardson of the Sunday Observer said it was ‘as good as a good Christie…I had not thought such an old familiar pattern could read so fresh’.