Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime

by Joanne Drayton

  As her health improved, life became busier. One of the highlights towards the end of her stay was Granada Television’s recording of her episode of Crown Court. ‘Jonathan Elsom has a big part which will be fun for both of us.’ A television strike interrupted rehearsals and shooting, and she thought she might have to sail before she saw it produced, but shooting of ‘Evil Liver’ began just in time. Her second stay with the Ballantraes had to be cancelled: ‘too much involved with the making of my Crown Court play on television’. She was delighted with the result. ‘They did it very well indeed & I do hope it finds its way out to N.Z.’

  Preparations for the trip home on the Oronsay were exhausting, ‘which is not surprising at my age after what I’ve been through’. But her final tests in England were clear and, amazingly, while she convalesced she had half-written a new book called Last Ditch, which she had begun on a brief excursion to Jersey She dedicated the book to ‘the family at Walnut Farm’, to whom she was deeply grateful for their care and support. Ngaio was a surviving friend from Nelly and Tahu Rhodeses’ generation and they had cared for her as if she were a parent.

  ‘I shall leave [England] with sorrow,’ she told Doris McIntosh, but there was little time to dwell on it. Almost as soon as she was back in New Zealand, Ngaio found herself involved in another production. She only just had time for the Christmas tree party, which had already been ‘announced to the children & couldn’t be unpicked’. Her friends were divided into two groups: those who received Christmas cards before she embarked on the show, and the remainder who received nothing at all and were ‘cross’.

  Jonathan Elsom had asked her to help him write and direct a show they would call Sweet Mr Shakespeare. Ngaio dropped everything to write and produce it in the two-week timeframe. ‘It was worth doing. He enriched & developed his performance quite wonderfully & on the last night had his audience—including me—in tears & completely enthralled.’ She was amazed at the sheer feat of memory. In 14 days he absorbed a vast script and delivered it with the intense focus of a solo performance. The show was positively reviewed at the Court Theatre, and in March 1976 it moved to Wellington for a season at Downstage. Ngaio was keen to see it travel beyond New Zealand and hoped it might tour American university campuses. She approached Dorothy Olding to help her place it with a suitable agent, but the difficulty of finding representation was an obstacle, and Elsom was already committed to Tom Stoppard’s Dirty Linen, which was drawing good crowds in the West End. Sweet Mr Shakespeare was filmed for Norwegian television in 1985.

  Last Ditch ‘went overboard’ for Sweet Mr Shakespeare, and its retrieval in the New Year was rocked by news of Bob Stead’s suicide. Ngaio could hardly believe it. They were such close friends and she had had no inkling of what he was contemplating. Since the car accident, he had been under ‘an intoxicating pressure of anxieties’, but this was completely unexpected.

  In spite of interruptions and shocks, the manuscript for Last Ditch was sent off, and she received responses in February. Edmund Cork hailed it as ‘the best’, and Ned Bradford’s cable began ‘Ngaio how you improve with age’. In reality, the manuscript had problems that required closer editing than ever before. The reader’s report for Collins began, ‘It’s marvellous how the old campaigners keep it up’, then continued to weigh up the pros and cons. At its worst it was a ‘self-indulgent conversation-piece…Although the idiom here is resolutely modern in some ways there are fossilised relics of older days.’ The plot was thin, the end anti-climactic, and murderer predictable. In its favour, the reader ‘emphasised the entertainment value of an extremely accomplished performance. It is witty and civilised and amusing…[and] never ceases to be thoroughly enjoyable.’

  Collins went ahead with publication because Last Ditch contained the ingredients that sold books. Ngaio had to make numerous changes, many of them the result of errors that had crept into the typescript owing to her own rewriting. In June, she received a ‘very-up bucking letter from Billy Collins saying he likes “Last Ditch” as much as anything I have ever written’. She told Doris McIntosh that she was walking on air.

  The book focuses on a now-adult Ricky Alleyn, who is a writer. He has escaped to one of the Channel Islands, as Ngaio had, to write a novel, and, like her, he battles insecurities.

  At half past nine on that same morning, Ricky chucked his pen on his manuscript, ran his fingers through his hair and plummeted into the nadir of doubt and depression that from time to time so punctually attends upon dealers in words.

  ‘I’m no good,’ he thought, ‘it’s all a splurge of pretension and incompetence. I write about one thing and something entirely different is trying to emerge. Or is there quite simply nothing there to emerge?

  But it is dealers in drugs, not words, who get Ricky into trouble. If he had stuck to his writing instead of staking out a suspected drug-dealer’s hideout, he would not have been kidnapped to secure the traffickers’ escape. But this is not his only lesson. Ricky also learns about infatuation when he falls for Julia Pharamond, a woman not unlike Nelly Rhodes. He is completely captivated. When they dance, he is overwhelmed by her presence. ‘The stars in the sky had come reeling down into the ballroom and the sea had got into his eardrums and bliss had taken up its abode in him for the duration of the waltz.’ He is in love, but Julia is a mother and a married woman.

  Immediately after submitting Last Ditch, she wrote ‘Morepork’ for a collection of short stories published for the International Crime Century Year. She disliked the prospect in principle, but ‘this was at the request of Julian Symons—he’s a personal friend, one I like very much…so I felt I had to give it a go’. Symons was a doyen of murder, thriller and detective fiction, and that seems to have made her strive for something extra. ‘Morepork’ has a clever twist in the end. It is set in the New Zealand bush that she loved so passionately, and in her descriptions of the primal forest she finds a voice as pure as the bird songs that are being recorded by fanatic Caley Bridgeman. While he is in the forest he is murdered, and his death is made to look like an accident. Bridgeman’s tape-recorder captures the voice of his killer, along with the mournful cry of the owl, or morepork, which according to Maori legend is a harbinger of death. The story was published in Verdict of Thirteen: A Detective Club Anthology by Faber and Faber in 1978, and by Harper and Row, in the United States, the following year.

  After Ngaio sent off ‘Morepork’, she was free to do nothing for the first time since she returned from England, ‘which is heaven’. Ngaio was an avid reader, and she and Doris McIntosh often discussed and swapped books. ‘At the moment I’m re-reading Michael Holroyd’s biography of Lytton Strachey.’ This she followed up with Virginia Woolf’s letters. Holroyd’s book was ‘well done’, but ‘Homosexuals seem to live in such a state of hectic misery & to get so little fun out of whatever antics they employ…one wonders they don’t give it up as a bad job.’ This comment undoubtedly had a real resonance for Doris, in relation to her husband, and Ngaio may have been tailoring her words for her friend’s sake, but it was a statement she made at regular intervals to different people in different ways. If Ngaio were a lesbian, she could not see the point in living openly as one.

  In May, she continued her respite by taking a 10-day vacation in Wellington with the McIntoshes. When she got back her cats were delighted to see her. ‘Lieut. Pinkerton is on my chest with loud manifestation of approval’. Earmes Catte Esquire was delighted, too. ‘Syl is in good heart & already a slave to her adopted puss—Mrs Millimant Mieux’, who was known on occasions to play with Ngaio’s ‘two hard-case items’.

  In July, Ngaio began another book. She had a ‘mass of desultory notes’ around her and ‘about 3000 words of the first chapter’. She did not have a firm idea about how it would develop, but ‘the setting (surprise, surprise) is a Kentish village’.

  That same month she heard that Bernard Ballantrae had cancer of the throat and Crawsie’s husband Andy had had a serious stroke. It was also around this time that she heard
more sad news: Billy Collins and then Agatha Christie had died. ‘I’m sure you were saddened by Agatha’s death but I gather it was a blessed relief for her,’ wrote Dorothy Olding. Friends were ill and dying and she herself was becoming increasingly infirm. Her cancer tests were still clear, but she had developed a cataract in the right eye. This was diagnosed immediately before the proofs for Last Ditch arrived. She wondered how she would manage, because she already knew these would be more demanding than usual.

  Her TV appearance for the New Zealand Encounter programme complicated the editing process by opening a floodgate of fan mail. ‘Which ranges from one lady who doesn’t care for Shakespeare but is keen on me to another who merely tells me she lost (literally it seems) her husband.’ The proofreading process for one book could cost her in excess of $100 just for postage. She had to shelve her new book at 18,000 words, and she found sitting over the proofs hard on her eyes.

  In November a hernia was diagnosed, but Ngaio decided not to go ahead with an operation unless it was necessary. The Christmas tree party that year followed a new pattern. ‘The parents are kindly getting the presents for me which saves a tiring trek around the shops.’ Friends stepped in to help—parents and players like Annette Facer and Helen Homes, and old friends such as Roses, Crawsie, and Sylvia. The tree looked magnificent with its candles blazing and an Angel on top ‘from Oberammergau’. ‘Freddie & Eve Page’s daughter [Anna Wilson] brought her little girl [Charlotte] dressed in the frock she had worn herself to the First Tree, 30 years ago.’ A young Teddy Tahu Rhodes was also in attendance.

  After the Christmas tree party she put herself in ‘purdah’ to finish her book, which was more troublesome than most. She considered abandoning it, but the idea of beginning again was more daunting than carrying on. In January 1977, Annette Facer encouraged her to participate in the South Canterbury Festival. As part of the celebrations there was a stage show, and Ngaio was convinced to read an excerpt from David Copperfield. ‘I must say I thoroughly enjoyed myself.’ Ngaio stayed at Mount Peel with her friends Kit and Jack Acland, and ‘revisited old haunts’.

  In April, copies of Last Ditch arrived from the publishers ‘clad in a ridiculous jacket on which the woman in question is depicted as galloping backwards…having successfully cleared the ditch in which she was found dead. Honestly!’ This was disappointing and so was progress on her new book. ‘All things conspire against it.’

  It was not long after this that Ngaio was admitted to Princess Margaret Hospital with angina and a life-threatening thrombosis. The combination was almost fatal. Someone informed the media ‘with the result that this little room is a cross between a horticultural side-show & a regional post-office…too kind but an awful problem for poor Roses’, who had to write the mountain of thank-you letters. At the end of June Ngaio was feeling better, but knew she would never have a full recovery. ‘I shall have to learn to “live with it” which is better than dying of it.’ Ngaio was on heavy medication that included the blood-thinning drug warfarin. It was more than a month before she was home.

  After her return, she was taken to the filming of Vintage Murder at the refurbished Theatre Royal. It was a great thrill. ‘George Baker who has been brought out to play Alleyn came to call & is a nice chap with a good voice & bags of English experience in theatre & studios’. When she saw Vintage Murder—along with Colour Scheme, Died in the Wool and Opening Night, made-for-television movies in a Ngaio Marsh Theatre series—. she decided that they were ‘thoroughly professional’ in acting and production, but that ‘the direction was often mistaken when it came to humour’. The humour that permeated her writing was an essential ingredient because it made what she did unique and brought it alive, but it proved elusive when conveyed dramatically. Even she found it difficult to preserve its subtleties in the stage adaptations she wrote of her own novels.

  She struggled on with her health and a ‘stand-up fight’ with the book, while the central heating sent out volumes of ‘black oily smoke’ and the new ‘astronomically expensive decromastic’ roof leaked. ‘I’ve had to give up my Christmas Tree Party for this year which I hate doing & cancel any other activities until I’m in the clear.’ But she had finished the ‘bloody book’, which was with a doctor friend of Anita Muling’s and Marjorie Chambers’ being ‘vetted for medical blunders’. The manuscript for Grave Mistake was duly sent off, and almost immediately Ngaio found herself committed to another short story for Julian Symons, this time for an important Crime Club compendium. With not much confidence in her short-story writing ability, she was casting around for a plot.

  Bob Scott, her player turned vicar and now associate priest at St Peter’s Church in Wellington, came to dinner at Marton Cottage and told her that Doris McIntosh’s knees were too bad for her to attend services. Ngaio had not realized how incapacitated her friend was and begged her to come and stay for a break, or perhaps Ngaio could ‘come up & hold the fort for a week’, but this did not happen. She was planning a trip to England the following year, if she could find good tenants. ‘I’m prepared to lend it—central heating, colour-telly, gardener & cats…to anybody who will be kind to the last named.’

  Ngaio, who had provisionally booked a passage for March 1978, was still at Marton Cottage in April, and her attitude to ‘the last named’—Lieutenant Pinkerton and Earmes Catte Esquire—was no less benign, even though they had been prime suspects in the case of a missing piece of meat. Ngaio had placed a small roast of beef in a syrupy marinade under a lid to soak for 24 hours. Later in the day she went into the kitchen, ‘did a spot of figure-skating, threw my feet up towards the ceiling & crashed on the floor with sickening emphasis’. She banged her head and bruised her coccyx, but broke no bones. Thoroughly shaken, she took herself off to bed. The next day, when the housekeeper asked where the meat was, Ngaio explained that it was in marinade on the table. The mystified woman plumbed the bowl, but there was no beef to be found. A closer examination of the crime scene revealed a trail of oily marinade leading out of the kitchen into the yard. ‘A BIG DOG—the Hound of the Baskervilles, presumably,’ people jokingly suggested, but Ngaio suspected an inside job, until a week or so later when there was a sequel. Ngaio heard a huge crash in the kitchen. As quickly as she could, she rushed to the door ‘just in time to see an enormous red Irish setter lolloping down the garden path with my delicious leg of Prime Canterbury in its maw’. The setter was caught and the cats were acquitted.

  The physical jolt of her fall possibly precipitated Ngaio’s next bout of illness, because not long after this she was back in Princess Margaret Hospital. Sylvia Fox wrote a reassuring note to Doris McIntosh: ‘Ngaio has a delightful room & every care & attention. She likes Mr [David] Hay her heart man very much.’ Ngaio was in considerable pain with her leg, and was expected to be in hospital at least another two weeks. Once again, it was a combination of thrombosis, heart problems and getting the balance of her medicine right. She was back home towards the end of May and ‘ploughing’ through the English proofs for Grave Mistake.

  She was encouraged in this laborious task by the thrilling news that, along with Daphne du Maurier, she had been awarded one of crime fiction’s highest awards. Elizabeth Walter wrote to her in March 1978: ‘Many congratulations from us all on becoming a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America—an honour which I am sure is long overdue.’ Ngaio was invited to collect her prize, a ceramic bust of Edgar Allan Poe, at an awards dinner in Los Angeles, but poor health made travel impossible so she received it by post. The recognition spurred her on to produce her last books under gruelling circumstances.

  On both sides of the Atlantic, her publishers thought Grave Mistake lacked a convincing motive for the murder. ‘I feel this is probably a case of you as a writer knowing exactly why,’ wrote Collins’s Robert Knittel, ‘but having inadvertently forgotten that the poor reader doesn’t have your inside knowledge.’ Ngaio’s response was less diplomatic and closer to the truth. She knew there were problems, but thought the trouble stemme
d from the fact that the book had ‘been interrupted so often by illness’. ‘[It] hung round my neck like the Ancient Mariner’s Albatross,’ she admitted to Edmund Cork. Apart from the technical problems, Grave Mistake was an old English cosy with the thinnest new paint job. What worked best were the parts written from experiences closest to Ngaio’s heart. ‘Obviously there is more than a nodding acquaintanceship between Upper Quintern & Birling,’ she wrote to Maureen and John Balfour. Her descriptions of the village of Upper Quintern were richly evocative, her night scenes written as freshly as if she were stepping out again into that crystal-clear Christmas Eve.

  Elizabeth Walter congratulated Ngaio on the cleverly drawn character of Verity Preston, and on the unrequited sexual static between her and suitor Nikolas Markos. ‘They linger in my mind in the way that the best characters in a book so often do,’ she wrote. Walter thought Ngaio had made a wise choice in leaving Verity and Nikolas buzzing but unbedded. Verity is a successful West End playwright. At the time of the murder ‘she was engaged in making extremely tricky alterations to the last act of a play which, after a promising try-out in the provinces, had attracted nibbles from a London management’. This was what Ngaio had wanted first for False Scent, Singing in the Shrouds and then When in Rome, but her stage plays remained in the provinces. Ngaio could make it happen in fiction, however, where the destiny of a play was in the hands of the author, not a fickle English theatre management. Ngaio increased the murderer’s share of the will, made his relationship with the victim knotty, and resubmitted the manuscript, with a dedication to criminal lawyer Gerald Lascelles.