Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime

by Joanne Drayton

  When she had been in London for about a year, Ngaio decided to take a holiday in Devon. She loved watching the English countryside as it changed from the scoured earth of winter, with its tracery of black-branched trees, to land that was lush green and ‘absolutely shouting itself hoarse with flowers’ and foliage. She walked the moors and enjoyed the woods and wildflowers of lonely uplands that were ‘so beautiful they almost hurt’. Why, she wondered, did the progression of England’s seasons have so much more significance? Its rhythms turned ‘slowly about the Heavens like the earth itself.’

  Ngaio’s September return to New Zealand had to be delayed because of the play. Edmund Cork loved the script she and Eileen Mackay sent, but she knew that the machinations of stage management were crisis-ridden and fickle. The theatre world in Britain and the United States was a ‘jungle’. She had discussions with the Worthing Theatre Company about casting, and received a commitment from them that False Scent would be staged in October. The management wanted her around to keep an eye on rehearsals.

  In the meantime she had abandoned her next novel, Hand in Glove, for the play script, and by June she still had 20,000 words to write, and her publisher was clamouring. It was hard to pick it up again after being ‘so long in suspension’. She worked all hours of the day and night on the novel. After a late stint, Ngaio would leave her folio of handwritten pages downstairs on the dining-room table, and sometimes, before he left for LAMDA, Elsom took a peek. Later, when the book was published and she sent him a copy, he was amazed to see his name on the dedication page. Hand in Glove is a parody of upper-class English country life. Light humour ran through it like the flowing rhythms of alliteration and assonance in the names of its principal characters: Percival Pyke Period, Bimbo Dodds, Nicola Maitland-Mayne and Mary Ralston, nicknamed Moppett. And the feline femme fatale in Scales of Justice, Thomasina Twitchett, had a Hand in Glove canine equivalent. But not all animals in Ngaio’s novels are equal, and Constance Cartell’s Pekinese is a stinker. Li-chi is the kind of dog that insists on ‘marrying your shoe’, and when let out after being caught short will fly off to the nearest newly turned flowerbed and use it. Constance Cartell’s brother, Harold, known as Boysie, has a half-breed Boxer called Pixie that is more trouble and even less attractive.

  Hand in Glove is a story about good breeding; about the fake ancestral lineage of the sad Percival Pyke Period; and about Constance Cartell’s adopted ward, Moppett’s, instinctive attraction to the bullying cockney men of her origins, in spite of a genteel upbringing.

  Harold Cartell’s murder by being crushed in a ditch under an enormous concrete pipe seems incidental to the exploration of themes of foolish pride and unhealthy parental indulgence. This is another novel of manners rather than ‘teckery’. Ngaio uses cameo romantic couples in almost all her novels; in Hand in Glove she has them in yin and yang opposites. There is Nicola Maitland-Mayne, painted by Troy for her 21st birthday, and her beau Andrew Bantling, from the right side of the tracks. Then there is Moppett with her slimy boyfriend Leonard Leiss, who slithers into this country cosy by virtue of Constance Cartell’s affection for her ward. The feelings between Nicola and Andrew are full of promise, while those of Moppett and Leonard are fatefully twisted by innate dishonesty. But the point about these contrasting kinds of love is never laboured and the story remains a delicate and cleverly charactered spoof. The underlying message, though, is that good breeding counts, and pedigrees, with the exception of rampant Pekinese, are advantaged by the purity of their lineage. ‘Having written the last word (I hope!) of my incubus of a book’, Ngaio was relieved to hand the script into her publishers. After months of writing, she was free.

  Ngaio enjoyed going to the theatre again with Pamela Mann. The ‘kitchen sink’ play was on its way out and high tragedy was making a return. Her taste in plays was relatively conservative: she found the ‘shapeless, climaxless, plotless’ modern plays unsatisfying. She enjoyed the palatable Existentialism of Pirandello, but not the more avant-garde or equivocal. ‘I still cannot help thinking the whole [Existentialist] theory is a sort of convoluted glimpse of the obvious.’ She was, though, willing to admit she might be at fault.

  She enthusiastically tracked the careers of her star players. ‘One of my boys’, Elric Hooper, was Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice at The Old Vic. His success was a matter of personal pride: he was her creation, one of a group of careers she launched that would have an international impact. For her young cousins, John and Bear, and her players, she wrote references and letters of introduction. When she was in England, she took them to weekend parties with the Rhodeses and to meet other friends. She liked having a select group of young men around as protégés and surrogate sons.

  A number of Ngaio’s key players were homosexual, although, in some cases, this was a matter of conjecture for Ngaio, because the subject was never discussed. Bob Scott was one of the few who openly talked about his sexuality as a young man. It puzzled her that he reconciled his Faith with his homosexuality, but she accepted his reasoning.

  Incongruously, while Ngaio surrounded herself with handsome young men, her own persona was distinctly androgynous. She was lady-like, but often wore the trappings of femininity as an actor wears a costume. Elric Hooper was visiting her Montpelier flat one day when she answered the telephone. There was an awkward silence, then a frosty voice said sternly, ‘That was Miss Marsh, thank you.’ The unfortunate caller had mistaken her deep contralto voice for a man’s, and it happened more than once.

  In the theatre world, Ngaio was less conspicuous, and her eccentricities were regarded as dramatic flourish, rather than a deviation from the norm. This was her milieu and her great ambition was to have a West End hit with one of her detective stories. She waited anxiously for a response to False Scent, which was staged at the Connaught Theatre in Worthing on 23 October.

  Ngaio’s False Scent play programme, rating the actors’ performances with handwritten annotations beside each name, suggests she thought the cast weak. Arthur Barrett as Roderick Alleyn was ‘awful’, Patrick Noble as Inspector Fox ‘peculiar’, and the director Guy Vaesen ‘adequate but not imaginative & a bit weekly rep’. The outcome of the ‘preliminary canter’ was that not long before her departure for New Zealand she was asked to rewrite the last Act of False Scent for an anticipated London season the following March.

  ‘This has not been a holiday,’ she told Doris McIntosh flatly. There was the play, then the book, and she had not been ‘inside a theatre for weeks & weeks’. Ngaio and Eileen Mackay took a two-week cruise around the Adriatic and Aegean before settling down for a final assault. The trip relaxed and refreshed her, and she was stunned by the beauty of Athens. With the rewrite completed, Ngaio made preparations to go home. It would be hard to leave London, but she felt settled about how things were left. Elric Hooper was doing well, and Jonathan Elsom had begun his career in Dundee with her old Hamlet, Jack Henderson, who was now head of Dundee Repertory. Recommended by Ngaio, Elsom arrived to find he had a major part. ‘It’s nice to see them so safely embarked as maybe in this precarious business’. Lucky Lockett was re-homed. ‘The telly has gone & the desk & the pictures & my luggage,’ she wrote to Elsom, ‘& as I look out on the lights over the little pub & hear people going past, I think of the last 18 months which have been so happy here.’

  Ngaio left on 30 November 1961, and was shocked to find when she arrived back in New Zealand that her Jaguar was impounded on the wharf. They refused to release it and she was furious. ‘I have done everything: but every bloody thing that was asked of me.’ It seemed that tax laws had changed retrospectively while she was in transit. It took an age and a fortune to get the car back; and the house, depressingly, was not the way she had left it. The plumbing was leaking and the tenants had allowed taps to drip and the cats to claw the furniture.

  But she was hardly home before a new project carried her off. Composer David Farquhar had been in touch by letter while she was overseas because both had been commissioned as a
collaborative team to create New Zealand’s first opera. Ngaio was to write the libretto based on The Wyvern and the Unicorn, her play script for children, and Farquhar was to write the music. Ngaio was excited about the project. In January she and Farquhar, who had come down from Wellington, worked on the opera ‘from 9 am until, dizzy with fatigue’ they retired to their ‘various couches in the early hours of the morning’. Well into March, Farquhar was ‘still hard at his Opera & is clamouring for a meeting SOON’. She had completed the libretto for the first and third Acts, but for the second, which was all singing, ‘[he] says he can’t get on without me’. Ngaio begged him to come down to Christchurch again, because she was frantically busy.

  She had been asked by the University of Canterbury to deliver the Macmillan Brown Lectures. This was an immense honour, because the series—founded by Professor John Macmillan Brown (1846-1935), a founding professor of the University of Canterbury—was one of the academic cornerstones in Christchurch. Ngaio picked a subject she knew well. ‘The Three Cornered World: Shakespeare in the Theatre’ was a detailed and more intellectual treatment of the themes of producer, actor, and audience which she had dealt with in A Play Toward in 1946 and also in Play Production, a booklet for schools that was published in 1948 and revised for the Post-Primary School Bulletin in 1960.

  She began with a lecture on the Shakespearian producer, describing the role as being similar to that of a lens, which collects disparate light like the multiple elements of a play, and projects it through the actors onto the audience. The producer was a transparent filter through which a play passed before it came to life, and inevitably there were those shattering ‘terrors of Shakespearian rehearsals’ when nothing was in focus: ‘Baleful nights and days when the play seems to come apart and fall to pieces,’ she wrote. ‘However careful his preparation, however great his own devotion and that of his company, he will, at one stage or another be visited by this nightmarish experience.’ She imagined what it would be like for Shakespeare confronted by an actor such as Burbage. ‘Look Will…what the hell am I meant to make of this one…what does it mean?’ Ngaio used wit, intelligence and personal experience to illuminate Shakespearian production, not just for specialists, but for a wider audience. The lecture was funny, fresh and fascinating, especially for those who heard it delivered in person in the museum auditorium.

  The actor was the subject of her second lecture. ‘He must feel the character grow within himself and out of his own personality,’ she observed, ‘and must make it known, boldly and widely, to however many persons may be waiting on the other side of the curtain.’ In essence, this was Constantin Stanislavsky in An Actor Prepares again. Ngaio knew what it was like to be a performer. She discussed the practicalities of breathing, of voice quality, control and projection. She identified the importance of the actor’s movement through a part, with its rhythm and climaxes, and considered the intrinsic significance of the ebb and flow in Shakespeare’s dramatic poetry. What was an actor? she asked. ‘How can one define him? As a body, a voice and a mind that is occupied in the mass-transmission of a playwright’s ideas? As a sort of pipeline between a dramatist and his public?’ If the producer was the lens, then actors were light itself, with its qualities of immateriality and transformation. She talked about the simplicity of Shakespeare’s most moving lines: ‘a sequence of short, homely words that fall across a profound calm and are so explicit’. Her poignant example of this was the ‘recognition scene’ in King Lear. Maybe she was thinking of what had happened during rehearsals for Lear in 1956, when she took the part of the mad king to Annette Facer’s Cordelia.

  Do not laugh at me;

  For, as I am a man, I think this lady

  To be my child, Cordelia.

  Facer was so moved that she cried. Ngaio knew, from experience, that the power of Shakespeare’s words to stir an audience lay not just in an actor’s interpretation of their meaning, but also in the conveying of their emotion.

  The audience, according to Ngaio’s third lecture, was what Shakespearian play production was all about. It was the third estate of the theatre, the one that gave meaning to the others. ‘Shakespeare’s act of creation, the actor’s changing attitudes over three hundred and sixty odd years’, developments in theatre design, technology, and the ‘whole accumulation of theatrical history’ was all focused on bringing the plays ‘to life before an audience’. The audience was like a giant fat cat, ‘strange and wonderful’, waiting in the dark to be fed. It was the consciousness in the blackness that absorbed the light. The audience was ‘a group of individuals’ that acted as one with different responses each night. At the end of her discourse on the audience, Ngaio tackled the thorny issue of funding assistance for professional theatre. She spoke of the cost to New Zealand of its most talented actors always having to go abroad to work, with little prospect of returning home. ‘What is wrong with us that we can, and do support magnificently, our orchestras, chamber music and opera and yet cannot sustain the classic drama at the professional level?’ It was a powerful way to end because it was less of a question than a challenge.

  Ngaio’s Macmillan Brown Lectures were delivered in April and broadcast by radio in May. What dated her ‘Three Cornered’ model, even in 1962, was its unequal weighting. Her triangle was really a pyramid with the power and control in the hands of a producer at the top. The actor was merely transformative material, and the audience a sometimes cruel, but nevertheless largely passive, beast waiting to be fed. She also presented Shakespeare’s plays as if they were finite in their interpretation. This seemed reactionary to theatre renegades who were already deconstructing Shakespeare and the roles of producer, actor and audience. But in its practical suggestions, compelling logic and lively debate, especially about a New Zealand theatre company, the series made a valuable contribution to thinking about play production.

  Ngaio was relieved to have the lectures over, but like sand at the beach, the hole it left in her workload was rapidly filled with competing projects. ‘One sits & wonders which in hell of these tasks one will tackle next & ends up going into a cross-eyed trance.’ In March, she had already talked with students about the annual play production, which she thought would be Macbeth; the theatre company was demanding more changes to False Scent before a London launch, and she was receiving letters twice a week from her assiduous co-writer, Eileen Mackay; A Unicorn for Christmas was in the making, with David Farquhar desperate to see her; and thoughts of another novel, her bread and butter, were knocking at her conscience. ‘I’ve simply got to get cracking on a new book before rehearsals begin.’

  She began Dead Water, which was inspired by her recent trip to Devon and Cornwall. It was an odd story, and maybe some of its quirkiness came from the feeling she had to write and the inevitable interruptions that dogged its conception and development. ‘It’s been a snorter to control from the kick-off,’ she later admitted to John Schroder. Ngaio dedicated the book to Alister and Doris McIntosh, who were becoming closer and closer friends.

  Ngaio’s relationship with the couple was interesting because Alister McIntosh was homosexual, as Ngaio knew and discreetly alluded to in her letters. She became a part of their marriage in a profound way, because for Doris she took on many of the roles of a partner. She was her confidante and her emotional support, and possibly more, although a physical dimension to this relationship was never suggested. But increasingly Ngaio wanted to share her special events with Doris, and Alister if he was available.

  The plot of the new novel revolves around the mercenary activities of a cult that is marketing the healing properties of the spring waters of Portcarrow Island, where, allegedly, a young intellectually disabled boy’s wart-covered hands have been washed clean in the spring. Desperate to escape tormenting children, he staggers into the pool, looks up directly into the sun and sees a Green Lady, who tells him: ‘Say “Please take away my warts”. Shut your eyes and do as I tell you. Say it again when you go to bed.’ The next morning his warts are gone and word
spreads rapidly. Soon tourists, along with the sick and the infirm, are coming to Portcarrow in Lourdes-like numbers. Racketeering becomes an economic strategy, and Portcarrow inhabitants organize package tours, turnstile entry into the spring enclosure, merchandising of magic water and painted plastic figurines of the Green Lady, and an annual commemorative festival run by the ‘near-nymphomaniac’, slightly unhinged Elspeth Cost.

  Emily Pride, the new suzerain of Portcarrow Island, and coincidentally a great friend of Roderick Alleyn, decides to put her foot down. In a past life, she was Alleyn’s wise old grasshopper, helping him with his French irregular verbs when he was a candidate for the Diplomatic Service. She was in the French Resistance and is staunchly moral. Any more spring-water swindling will be over her dead body. There are death threats and two attempts on Emily Pride’s life before a body finally surfaces in the spring waters of the miraculous Green Lady grotto. But it is the wrong one: Elspeth Cost’s, not Emily Pride’s.

  Although the storyline is farcical, and the murderer more predictable than most, the setting of Portcarrow Island is magnificently evoked, as is the crowd mentality of the miracle seekers. Memories of Oberammergau give vividness to Ngaio’s writing: descriptions of rubbish-strewn pathways after spiritual tourists have passed by, busloads of anxious people desperate for a cure or an answer to their torments, and behind it all blind faith. Oberammergau’s tourist shops sold wooden crucifixes and painted figurines; on Portcarrow Island, in Miss Cost’s Gifte Shoppe, are bottles of magic water, pamphlets, handwoven jerkins, novelties and row upon row of painted plastic Green Ladies.