Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime

by Joanne Drayton

  For many in Christchurch, Lascelles was as mysterious and intriguing as one of Ngaio’s characters. He moved in cultural circles that were theatrical and musical and therefore often fringe and bohemian, and his work as a barrister involved dealings with shady criminal characters; in conservative and suspicious Christchurch, rumours circulated. Ngaio was a fierce supporter of friends, and Gerald Lascelles was one of her best. Her dedication to him was as much a statement of solidarity as of thanks.

  She had ‘trudged through’ proofs unwell and with reduced eyesight, so the outcome was cause for celebration. ‘Grave Mistake seems to be beating all records in the U.S.A.,’ she wrote to Maureen Balfour the following year. ‘It has sold 22,000 copies…& [is] still going strong.’ The book was also taken up by the English and American Mystery Guilds, which delighted both Collins and Little, Brown—and Ngaio. Her Golden Age detective fiction had a momentum that was still going strong.

  Success would have been sweeter, though, if not for family worries. Stella Mannings’s second husband, after just four years together, had a series of life-threatening strokes, and she was ‘very sad’ to hear that Jean’s second husband had died. Ngaio had helped pay for Jean’s son to go to school and was distressed to think the family might be disrupted by tragedy again. Both women took respite stays with Ngaio. There was also the disturbing news that Bruce Mason had been diagnosed with cancer. Her generation was suffering, and every good moment must be cherished.

  In August, Doris McIntosh sent Ngaio and Sylvia two dozen mussels. They replied in a joint thank-you note; Ngaio’s contribution is in italics:

  We write to thank you jointly for a luncheon binge the like of which has never been surpassed or indeed equalled. Firstly, soup made by Syl of unparalleled richness. Next, with brown bread & butter. With these, a light lager. Being now, up to our gunwales & incapable of more we close this effusion repeating over [sic] warmest & fullest and most grateful thanks & blessings. Sylvia Ngaio

  Ngaio and Sylvia did things as a couple. They entertained, often had Anita Muling and Marjorie Chambers over for lunch or dinner, and their favourite pastimes were going out to films, the theatre or concerts. Sylvia drove at night so that Ngaio would not be housebound with her cataract.

  They became stalwarts of the Court Theatre. Ngaio was particularly thrilled with Elric Hooper’s directorship, and his work was a draw for them both. In private she called him the ‘infant phenomenon’, and thought of him as, at times, difficult and demanding, but brilliantly talented. She believed he had ‘lifted the level of The Court out of all sight’. It was something she had desperately wanted to do herself, but she was generous enough to recognize, and delight in, the achievement of another.

  Hooper’s success at the Court was part of a blossoming of professional theatre companies in New Zealand. The demise in 1960 of Richard and Edith Campion’s touring New Zealand Players had proved that the cost of moving a professional company around the country was prohibitive. As a result, the concept was largely abandoned. Wellington’s Downstage opened in 1964, Auckland’s Mercury in 1968, and in Christchurch the Court was established in 1971. It was the realization of Ngaio’s dream of professional opportunities and standards of production in New Zealand theatre. She had hoped it could be achieved through a national theatre company, but accepted now that this was more likely to be achieved through independent urban-based professional companies.

  Directing was Hooper’s ‘true metier & Jonathan has had shining notices for his performance in The Millionairess…& Jimmy Laurenson goes from strength to strength. So all this old bird’s chicks prosper,’ she told Bruce Mason.

  Less pleasing was the news that a rogue American publisher had pirated 23 of her novels and was selling them illegally. She was informed of the fraud by the American Mystery Writers Association. The distressing episode became a lengthy saga of lawyers and to and fro correspondence with little resolution. ‘It may turn out to be an operation of the stable-door kind,’ she wrote to Doris McIntosh, and she was right.

  A highlight of 1978 was a last trip in July to stay with the Dacres-Mannings family in Sydney. ‘My visit to Johnny and Bet in Sydney was great fun. They are such darlings & the children are Heaven.’ The purpose of the visit was to see her godson Nicholas confirmed. The trip back to New Zealand realized all of Ngaio’s fears of flying. In anticipation of turbulence, before they took off the pilot warned passengers not to be concerned when the wings ‘wobbled’. This was the entrée to a flight from hell. Ngaio had gastro-enteritis, which added to her difficulties. ‘Drawers opened of their own accord, china crashed, everything was bouncy-bouncy’, and when she arrived she was almost blown off the tarmac.

  Not long after her return to Christchurch, Ngaio began a new novel. Her mobility was limited. ‘One begins to wonder which bit of one is going to be left in something like working order.’ Writing, however, was something she could do successfully. In October she wrote to Doris McIntosh: ‘I’m glued to my work & see & think of little else than how to pin a plot to a group of characters…It’s a worrying & disagreeable phase.’ She hoped the novel would emerge from its misty beginnings. Photo-Finish proved almost as difficult to write as its predecessor. For only the fourth time in a career spanning almost 50 years, Ngaio set the story in New Zealand. She worried about the ‘danger of letting it degenerate into a sort of travelogue with a crime theme pinned on to it’, but she continued to write in spite of her ‘usual doubts’. She planned to dedicate the book to Fred and Eve Page.

  Ngaio celebrated her Christmas tree: ‘Presents, visits innumerable from all my old “children” of the Shakespeare days. I find it impossible to believe that the earliest ones are approaching the 50 mark.’

  Collins requested changes to the manuscript of Photo-Finish—they wanted four keys instead of three—but these alterations were superficial. A reader’s report extolled the book’s virtues, although exchanges between Alleyn and Fox were described as ‘distasteful’ and Alleyn’s relationship with Troy ‘dowsed with customary treacle’:

  The which said, the story is an astonishing achievement by a woman of 80 [actually, 84], and it shows her to have kept her vitality and control much longer than Agatha did. It is witty, the setting is impressive, the plot is tidily organised and the solution is dramatic. What more?…This is a rich and engrossing story by a professional who has not lost her cunning.

  Collins wanted to publish the book as part of their Crime Club’s jubilee celebrations. Ngaio’s Scales of Justice had featured in their silver anniversary celebrations and this was a remarkable demonstration of publishing continuity. There was to be an honorary dinner on 23 April 1980, which was Ngaio’s and Shakespeare’s birthday and St George’s Day. Fifteen senior police officers were invited, along with Crime Club authors and a heavy contingent of media. ‘We had an enormous white iced cake with a huge Crime Club Gunman on it, and the words: “Collins Crime Club, 1930-1980” embossed on it in gold lettering,’ Elizabeth Walter wrote to Ngaio. Ian Chapman of Collins made a speech, Julian Symons replied, and Walter cut the cake with a huge sword. She offered to send Ngaio a slice. ‘Fossilized or not,’ Ngaio replied, ‘I shall give my piece of cake a hearty, nostalgic munch.’

  Photo-Finish was a return to better form for Ngaio. The structure was tighter, and the setting fresher for its change of air. The New Zealand outdoors provides an epic backdrop to the murder of world-famous opera singer Isabella Sommita. Television presenter Max Cryer, who visited Ngaio at Marton Cottage at this time, said she told him Isabella Sommita was based on Maria Callas, and the soprano certainly comes across as a similarly larger-than-life character. ‘The lady has the temperament of a wild cat and the appetite of a hyena,’ says her singing master, Signor Lattienzo.

  The conventions are Golden Age—a house party at a luxurious island lodge in the middle of a fictitious South Island lake—but some of the issues are contemporary, especially that of a stalking member of the paparazzi who makes Isabella Sommita’s life unbearable. She is fol
lowed relentlessly—Milan, Paris, London, New York, Sydney—and ugly gratuitous snaps were taken and published with ridiculous captions. ‘The general effect [of one of the published photographs] was that of a gargoyle at the dentist’s: an elderly and infuriated gargoyle. The photograph was signed Strix.’ Alleyn is dispatched from England to relieve Isabella Sommita of her pursuer and, by an astonishing coincidence, Troy is commissioned to paint a portrait of the diva’s benefactor, Montague V. Reece. This will be another busman’s holiday.

  Photo-Finish was released in September 1980, to warm reviews and pleasing sales. ‘My memory is deteriorating but fortunately not, so far, in the matter of writing books & I am a happy old girl by & large,’ she told John Balfour. Writing gave Ngaio purpose and kept her vital.

  One of the literary challenges of 1980-81 was a revision of Black Beech. David Elworthy in Auckland broached the subject with Ngaio and Elizabeth Walter. Ngaio’s response was that ‘her life since the early fifties had been singularly dull’, but she would make an attempt, and Walter replied: ‘it would give me great personal pleasure to do the book, but it does need to be something more than the original modest memoir’. Ngaio tackled the gaps by adding material about her crime fiction writing and aging. She completed the 30,000-word extension in January 1981. ‘It’s been tricky work,’ she admitted to Maureen Balfour, ‘sandwiching new bits into old ones & the end result is anyone’s guess.’ The additions were more revealing about Ngaio as a writer and an older woman, but did not illuminate the private psychological life that Elizabeth Walter had hoped to read more about. Ngaio had still not let her hair down.

  Ironically, at the same time as she was making additions to Black Beech, she was systematically destroying papers. Each day her housekeeper, Joy Carter (now Wilkinson), was given piles of documents—letters, notes, handwritten manuscripts and even photographs—to take down to the incinerator to burn: ‘I took arm loads each afternoon.’ It was a practical endeavour that coincided with extensive renovations to the house, but it was also an expunging of the private Ngaio. She had destroyed correspondence throughout her life: this was a final purge.

  It was during this time that two important records of Ngaio in her late years were saved: one was her interview for a Kaleidoscope television programme; the other was a series of interviews conducted by a young student, Bruce Harding, for his master’s thesis in English at Canterbury University.

  Harding first met Ngaio in 1977, but because of her ill health it was not until April 1978 that he began recording their conversations. He had difficulty being taken seriously. ‘I certainly ran into quite a lot of academic snobbery and disdain for wishing to do a project…on an author who dared to dirty her hands in the commercial world of popular writing,’ he recalls. He went with his topic proposal to the Head of the English Department, Professor John Garrett, who was originally appalled at the idea. I think I actually remember him saying: “Ngaio Marsh! After I’ve taught you: Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley!” ’ In the end, Professor Garrett was persuaded to write a letter of introduction to Ngaio’s secretary, Rosemary Greene, and an appointment was made. Harding asked Ngaio many questions about her life, and particularly her writing, which she answered candidly. The one taboo subject was the Rhodes family and their relationship to the Lampreys. Always the privacy of her intimates was paramount.

  He canvassed her frustration at being marginalized by the New Zealand literati because she wrote detective fiction. She was cautious not to generalize, because significant people such as John Schroder, Allen Curnow, Maurice Shadbolt, Mervyn Thompson and Bruce Mason had supported her writing over the years. But she did think there was a prevailing provincial snobbery in New Zealand that was largely absent overseas. In Britain and the United States, academics like Ronald Knox wrote detective fiction to demonstrate their flexibility and as a diversion from their usual mode of writing. The academy’s disdain of her books was a matter of contention for Ngaio. Ironically, those who dismissed her work as Anglo-centric often had a misplaced sense of superiority born of English-based academic élitism. As Harding explains: ‘New Zealand literary academia was…I would now say, too provincial, too Neo-colonised—acting as though the concrete quadrangles of Ilam [Canterbury University] was still somehow Oxbridge’. Harding’s research anticipated a scholarly interest in New Zealand popular culture, fostered by Post-Structuralism and already blossoming overseas.

  Ngaio’s friends were succumbing to old age. Sylvia had a frightening reoccurrence of cancer. ‘She’s as brave as a lion & makes nothing of it but I’m afraid things don’t look at all good,’ Ngaio told Doris McIntosh. Sylvia received radiation treatment in 1979, and miraculously went into remission. News of Ned Bradford’s death reached Ngaio in October 1979; and sadly, less than a year before, a friend of the McIntoshes called to tell her that Alister had died. Doris was now too frail to write, so Ngaio rang instead. ‘I was so happy to hear your voice sounding exactly as of old.’ But she worried that her telephone calls were tiring. ‘Unless you say “don’t” I shall go on [ringing] from time to time.’

  In the midst of disruptive renovations to add a new study and lift to her house, Ngaio began thinking about another novel. The renovations would be at ‘awful expense’ and she had received a crippling tax bill of $28,000 that cleaned out her savings. She needed the money and the distraction, and what she had in mind was almost a date with destiny. ‘It’s been in my head for years and I’ve always shied off it realising how difficult it would be,’ she explained to Elizabeth Walter. Ngaio planned to set Light Thickens at her fictional Unicorn Theatre in London, with the now mid-career director Peregrine Jay and his sidekick, set designer Jeremy Jones. The murder would occur during a production of Macbeth. It would bring together the worlds she loved, literature and the theatre, and draw on the idea that staging Macbeth was bad luck.

  With this in mind, she tackled her ultimate challenge.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Dénouement

  Peregrine stood with his back to the curtain, facing the company with whom he was about to take a journey. Always it felt like this.’ This is his opportunity to direct a perfect Macbeth. It needs to be compact and drive quickly through to the end. It must be remorseless, like Macbeth’s own slide into evil. He has cut out ‘spurious’ parts of the play to reveal its structure and economy. He has chosen his cast carefully and without bias. Some of them he does not like, but they are actors not friends. His Lady Macbeth oozes the sexual allure that might steel a man to murder, and his thane seems infinitely capable of it. Jeremy’s set is perfect. ‘It’s so right! It’s so bloody right,’ Peregrine exclaimed when he saw the sketches.

  The witches are right, too: two women and a Maori man called Rangi, who understands the mysticism of the tribe and brings the power of his ancestors to the stage. Peregrine is not superstitious, but Rangi has presence. What Peregrine wants is authenticity: to capture the essential forms and linguistic magic of the Bard. His costuming is accurate, down to the detail of the black sheepskin tunics. His fight scene, in which Macbeth is decapitated off stage, has been choreographed by an expert swordsman, Gaston Sears, who carries a real claidheamh-mòr on stage.

  The rehearsals are exacting. Peregrine expects the best from his players, but is clear about what he wants. He talks the characters through with the actors who play them. It is as if he momentarily merges with the characters himself, and his insights are profound. He is good; they are good. He feels it, that moment in rehearsal when ‘the play flashes up into a life of its own and attains a reality so vivid that everything else fades’. The life of a brilliant production is there, and all would be perfect—if it were not for the sequence of hoaxes that blister concentration and send his superstitious actors into a frenzy of crucifix kissing. There is the fake decapitated head mysteriously suspended in the king’s room, then planted under a dish on the banquet table; there is the real rat’s head in Rangi’s witch’s shopping bag; and the anonymous note that reveals nine-year-old William, who plays the s
on of Macduff, as the real son of a serial killer.

  The play is to start on 23 April, Shakespeare’s birthday, and royalty will be there on opening night. Peregrine can only pray that the prankster will take a night off, and miraculously this happens. ‘AT LAST! A FLAWLESS MACBETH’ sing the praises of the press: ‘the best Macbeth since Olivier’s and the best Lady Macbeth in living memory’. When he receives his review copy, William the child prodigy shouts, ‘Mum! What’s an Infant Phenomenon? Because I’ve avoided being one.’

  How long can perfection survive the bad luck of Macbeth? The company plays for a month to full houses. The tension builds, foreboding and ominous, until the murder of Macbeth in Light Thickens seems as inevitable as Duncan’s. For one last time, a murder will happen while Alleyn sits in the audience. At the end of the final duel between Macbeth and Macduff, there is a cry off stage, more action, then Gaston Sears appears with Macbeth’s head held aloft on the end of his claidheamh-mòr. It is supposed to be a fake, but this time it drips real blood. ‘The ambulance men came in and put the body into a plastic bag and the bag on a stretcher.’ It is an ignominious exit for Sir Dougal Macdougal, playing the thane.

  It was the most difficult book Ngaio had ever written. ‘The play closes in on him. And on us,’ Peregrine tells the cast. ‘Everything thickens.’ The same thing was happening for Ngaio. As she told John Balfour, ‘It was extremely difficult & has the form of a fugue, really, with sophistications woven through the growth of the play…It was hell to write.’ She thought, in the end, that if it appealed to anyone it would be to theatre lovers and academics rather than to her stalwart detective fiction readers.

  Before she completed the manuscript, she heard the sad news that Denys Rhodes had died. Now there were only two left ‘out of that most lovable family’, Maureen and Teddy. Her own health was a delicate balance of cautious living and complex medication. She could not be alone at night, and, after a succession of live-in housekeepers, she had found Mrs Berens, a ‘magnificent Dutchie, terribly expensive but a godsend’. Then Sylvia broke her ankle on a treacherous visit through the hedge. ‘She skidded down hill on her bottom into my garden where she remained for some time wailing to us,’ Ngaio explained to Maureen Balfour. As soon as she was out of hospital, on crutches and mobile, Sylvia moved in with Ngaio and they were both cared for by the devoted Mrs Berens. It was like old times. They laughed together and entertained each other with their private jokes. Sylvia spent the winter with Ngaio, then moved back to her house behind the hedge.