Black Beech and Honeydew

by Ngaio Marsh

  You might say the writer of a detective story is in much the same situation as a barrister whose practice is largely in crimes of violence. One gets up the case and in the process often has to do a lot of research in a number of fields: medical jurisprudence, police law, poisons, the drug racket, the arts, ballistics, the Judge’s Rules or the laws of evidence. I have amassed a large collection of reference books and often am obliged to fag through one or another of them in search of some technical detail to which I will refer in a single sentence. No matter how plain sailing and simplistic you may consider the plot you’ve chosen, sooner or later you’ll find yourself involved with technical concerns.

  Suppose you decide that the crime is simply this: one man hits another man on the head with a half-brick in a dirty sock and leaves the body in a dark alley. Plain sailing you think? In no time your detective, and therefore you, are involved with the component parts of brick-dust, the various types of wool from which socks are woven or knitted and the places of origin of such microscopic traces of dirt as cling to the sock in question. Once the book is concluded you forget all this stuff and I’m told barristers who so confidently expound their expert knowledge to juries do exactly the same thing. The information has served its purpose: away with it.

  Sometimes, however, things turn out oddly. One of the rare occasions when I began with a plot rather than with people was in writing Scales of Justice. A friend who was a member of the Royal Society and an authority on trout, told me that the scales of trout are unique in as much as those of one trout never have corresponded and never can correspond exactly with those of another. In this they resemble human fingerprints.

  This, of course, immediately suggested a title and pleasing subject matter for a book. So I wrote Scales of Justice and in due course typescripts were sent off to my English and American publishers. To my astonishment the American script-reader wrote crisply in the margin ‘Trout do not have scales.’ I can only suppose she was thinking of eels.

  It really is best to stick to backgrounds with which one is familiar. That is why Troy and I are concerned with painting and so many of my stories take place in theatres among those larger-than-life persons, actors.

  Actors, indeed, make splendid copy. They tend to express every emotion up to the hilt. If they are pleased to see you they are enraptured to see you. If they are bored or depressed they turn the mask of comedy upside down and are desolate. If they are ironical or sarcastic they make jolly sure they let you know it with the well-timed sneer. It is not that they are insincere in their extravagances, it is their business and habit to give every reaction its due and then some. In that respect they can be said to be unusually truthful. This makes them good material for detective fiction.

  I’ve said already that it never does to talk about a book while it is merely a fragile idea. I now break this rule by confessing that I have often dallied with the notion of writing a book about a company rehearsing Macbeth, which, as every actor knows, is thought to be an unlucky play. I have not found it so and do not subscribe to the superstition. It would be satisfactory to bring the two major interests of my life together for, as it were, a final fling and the actor’s response to the situation as it develops could be an intriguing ingredient.

  I hope I have one more book in me and I hope too I’ll have the sense to call it a day if it turns out to be below standard. But my memory! As I have already confessed it has always been erratic, treacherous to a degree when the thing to be recalled is not particularly interesting but uncannily sharp when for some reason it was something that had attracted me. My father was a great singer-about-the-house and his choice in songs was Gilbertian. Patter songs, production numbers, romantic ballads, wandering minstrels, Lord High Executioners, jesters, judges, peers and policemen; he warbled away, taking his own time with them and it was often a very slow time. The other day I wondered how much of the interminable ‘Nightmare Song’ from Iolanthe might have lodged itself, unknown to me, in my wayward recollection. I had never attempted to memorize it. I started off and got, I think faultlessly, as far as words were concerned, to the end. But if you asked me to name all the characters in my latest book, Photo-Finish, as likely as not I’d be flummoxed. I suppose Freud would find something rather disgusting to dredge up about all this but I don’t particularly want to hear it, though not for the reason advanced by my schoolboy cousin who, on being asked if he was interested in psychology, replied ‘I’m a-Freud I’m too Jung.’

  II

  Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back

  Wherein he puts alms for oblivion

  Ulysses in his elderly wisdom, is saying, and how marvellously he says it, that no one who has achieved recognition for his work can afford to rest on his laurels. It’s no good, he says, for achievement to ‘seek remuneration for the thing it was’. Keep it up. Go one better or sooner or later, out you’ll go. Cold comfort for the lightweight novelist.

  In contemplating the affairs of men, Shakespeare is a determined realist, perhaps the most unsentimental in our literature. In nothing does this attitude of mind declare itself more absolutely than in the passages about death. True, one must always recognize that in plays the situation and the characters stand like a veil between author and audience, but surely there are many instances when the veil is almost transparent, when the character does in fact speak for the creator. Can anyone read or listen to Claudio’s speech about death in Measure for Measure and not believe Shakespeare’s personal horror of it is there, before our eyes and in our own hearing?

  Claudio is condemned to death. The price of his reprieve is that his sister buy it by yielding to the lust of the unspeakable Angelo. In the subsequent scene with her brother she takes it for granted that he will be prepared to sacrifice himself. He pleads with her.

  Aye, but to die, and go we know not where;

  To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot…

  The speech is a horrifying and horrified confrontation with the physical ignominy that follows death and a terrifying speculation as to what may happen to the released spirit. One cannot escape the feeling that the poet himself had experienced these fears.

  At the time when his small son Hamnet died, Shakespeare was writing King John. In this play another little boy dies. His mother says ‘Grief fills the room up of my absent child.’ Here, in these desolate words, the veil between the author’s sorrow and his audience, it seems to me, is very thin indeed.

  The Emperor Julius Caesar teeters between heroics and geriatric posturing. We are given one or two momentary back-flashes of the man in his heyday, particularly in his celebrated reply to the threat of assassination. He says of death,

  It seems to me most strange that men should fear,

  Seeing that death, a necessary end,

  Will come when it will come.

  The same acceptance of inevitability is echoed by Hamlet:

  If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if ‘it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come – the readiness is all. Since no man owes of aught he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.

  In King Lear, the most pessimistic of all the plays, it is not only the longing for extinction of the dying themselves that is expressed but also that of the living, the onlookers, for release from the unendurable spectacle of death. Kent cries out,

  O let him pass!

  He hates him

  That would upon the rack of this tough world

  Stretch him out longer.

  And as Kent speaks, the old King dies.

  I cannot find that anywhere, except in the obligatory, conventional or ceremonial speeches of one or another of the characters, does Shakespeare promise, through them, some happy continuation after death, unless it be found in Cleopatra’s proud boast that in the Elysian fields she and Mark Antony, holding hands, will walk together.

  In Cymbeline the little dirge for the supposed Fidele says consolation is to be found in oblivion. The dead boy has nothing to fear. He knows nothing. To him �
��the reed is as the oak’. ‘Quiet consummation have’ is the poet’s final wish for him and, one feels almost as an afterthought, a kind of politeness, he adds ‘and renowned be thy grave.’

  A very short time before his death the actor, Robert Donat, recorded some of the poems that he liked very much and this was the one he chose from Shakespeare. He introduces it by quoting an old Lancashire woman who had once said to him that Shakespeare was ‘sootch a coomfort’. She was right. The solace this dirge offers is not of the conventional kind but nevertheless there is comfort as well as fear in the thought of oblivion.

  In old age one begins to consider these matters. One hesitates to speak of death to one’s friends for fear of making them feel awkward. There is something a little farouche in being ‘on’ about one’s own demise. Luckily in this, as in so many other respects, there is always Shakespeare. He says it all.

  People sometimes remark on the gruesomeness of some of the murders in my earlier books and are inclined to take the line of wondering how a nice old dear like me could dream up such beastliness, let alone write about it. The idea being, I fancy, that perhaps the old dear is not so nice after all. I really have no answer to this unless it be the one I gave to the soldier at the Brains Trust, ‘Perhaps it’s a substitute for committing crimes myself’ but, with the deepest respect to the psychiatrists, I really don’t think I’m sublimating any bloody inclinations lurking in my unconscious or id or libido or whatever it is and if that’s the right way of putting it. I am, in fact, extremely squeamish and cannot read accounts of physical torture or cruelty to animals or humans without reacting most unhappily. True, in Photo-Finish a snapshot is skewered to a corpse but at least the victim was already dead when this indignity was inflicted.

  And here, it occurs to me, is the place to confess that for some time now, I have seldom read crime fiction except when it was written by Wilkie Collins or, unresolvedly, Charles Dickens. Or, of course, when I have been asked to contribute a blurb for a bookjacket. I don’t know why this abstinence has occurred; perhaps the pursuit of other writers’ achievements became too much like a busman’s holiday. Or perhaps I live too far away from my brothers and sisters in crime. In England it was a great adventure to get together with them at Crime Writers’ festivities and to talk about the craft. Particularly was this so with Julian Symons and Harry Keating, joint victims with me on those Midlands tours when we paid for our literary luncheons with our tongues. Julian is, of course, the doyen of the genre, and compulsive reading for all practitioners. Bloody Murder is the last word in critical appraisal. Harry’s Inspector Ghote is always an enchanting read. Yet, if his creator and I had not met I don’t expect I would have made the Inspector’s acquaintance and thereby would have missed a great treat.

  In my early days when I was still rather bemused by growing success as a writer and found it difficult to believe in it, I was invited, with my agent, Edmund Cork, to an initiation ceremony held by the Detection Club. Because of my isolation down-under I could not be considered as a possible member. There was a rule that a certain number of attendances at meetings every year must be observed. So it was very kind indeed of them to invite us to their party.

  We dined, grandly, at the Dorchester and then retired to a private room where, or so it now seems to me, the only pieces of furniture were a lectern and two chairs against the wall. Edmund and I were placed in these, hard by the lectern.

  This was before the Second World War and the Golden Age of the detective novel, as it is sometimes called, still flourished. The members present that I can remember were Dorothy Sayers, John Rhode, Freeman Wills Croft and Anthony Gilbert (who is a lady). Agatha Christie was a founder-member but was not there that night. E. C. Bentley, the extremely skilled writer of the classic Trent’s Last Case, was to be initiated. To me, in the insolence of comparative youth, they all seemed to be elderly.

  Everybody except Edmund and I left the room. I am sorry to say that in the deathly silence that attended our isolation we became very slightly hysterical but, so far, in control of ourselves. We spoke, I seem to remember, in whispers as if we were in church.

  The door at the far end of the room opened and Miss Sayers entered, now kitted out in full academic regalia. She mounted the lectern and was near enough, if one had ventured, to be touched. I was dismayed to see that in the folds of her gown she secreted a side-arm – a pistol or revolver or six-shooter.

  She was followed by the rest of the company. There were Wardens. The Warden of the Naked Blade (Freeman Wills Croft, I fancy) with a drawn sword. The Warden of the Hollow Skull, or perhaps I should say ‘Death’s Head’, which was carried on a cushion by John Rhode and by a quaint device could be made to light up from within, and the Warden of the Lethal Phial (Anthony Gilbert) with a baleful little bottle. I am sorry if with the passage of so many years I have got objects and bearers mixed up. In their midst, looking shy, came E. C. Bentley. He was placed before Miss Sayers who now administered a long, complicated and very classy oath written by someone high up in the crime-writing hierarchy. (Could it have been Father Ronald Knox?) It was all about not concealing clues or making a policeman a murderer or (could it be?) having a Chinese character or arrow poison in one’s book but I do not remember all the things one mustn’t do. It was very impressive and beautifully phrased.

  Mr Bentley took the oath, John Rhode switched on the Skull, Freeman Wills Croft, who looked like a highly respected family solicitor, rather gingerly flourished the Sword, Anthony Gilbert displayed the Phial and Miss Sayers, taking Edmund and me completely off our guard, loosed off her gun. The noise was deafening. I think I let out a yelp and I am sorry to record that dear Edmund, who has a loud laugh, laughed excessively.

  The ceremony completed, we all went to the Detection Club’s rooms in Soho and in great awe I heard them speak rudely about their publishers. A year or two later, on another visit, Miss Sayers asked me to dine with her and see them perform a skit on the Sherlock Holmes stories in which she was Mrs Hudson and I think Watson dunnit.

  I am now a member of the Detection Club. Very kindly they waived their rule about regular attendances. They have, in some sort, been supplanted by the much bigger Crime Writers’ Association which organizes trips abroad, presents awards and arranges for high-up policemen, pathologists, medical jurisprudents and all sorts of exciting authorities to address them. It would be lovely to go to these splendid parties.

  It was some time after the adventure at the Dorchester that I first met Agatha Christie. She was kind and encouraging and struck one as being shy. I suppose it could be said that she was also an enigmatic person, since the mystery of her disappearance for some days during an unhappy episode in her past has been so often revived and, after her death, was actually used as subject matter for a book and film. We met several times and I like to remember those meetings. Nowadays, especially in America, a sort of ‘thing’ goes on about whether or not I have stepped into her shoes. I don’t think I have and I wish it wouldn’t. I don’t think that, beyond the fact that we are both crime writers, we have technically very much in common. She is the absolute tops in plotting. Her books are at the apex of the classic style of detective fiction. A puzzle is set up and a contest between author and reader carried through to a surprise ending. She, almost always, is the winner. Her characters are two-dimensional, lively, extremely well-defined and highly entertaining. To call them silhouettes is not to dispraise them. (After all, what’s wrong with the silhouette of a hawk-faced man in a deerstalker hat and an Inverness cape?) You may say that in form and style Agatha Christie is a purist.

  I, on the other hand, try to write about characters in the round and am in danger of letting them take charge. Continually I have to pull myself together and attend to the plotting and remind myself that this is a detective story and I’d better not start fancying myself in other directions.

  Two years ago the Mystery Writers of America made me a Grand Master of their Society. (I expect they feel that Grand Mistress might be
a bit equivocal – a little too suggestive of a maîtresse-en-chef.) John Ball who, as well as being a crime writer himself, has a successful film to his credit, was in New Zealand and invited me to attend the award-giving dinner in Los Angeles at which I would receive a china bust of Edgar Allan Poe. Unhappily I was not able to accept this very kind invitation even though Mr Ball wooed me with offers of a pavilion in his garden where I would be able to sit rather like an oversized plaster gnome and write. And so, to coin a phrase, Poe was posted. I look up at this moment and there, to my pride, he stands: stylisé, corpse-like, sheet-white, with closed eyes and black moustache, and there, fused into his pediment, is my name and the date, 1978. An uninformed person might make the silly mistake of supposing him thus labelled, to be me. I was very much touched by this handsome compliment.

  III

  I have been looking through the earlier chapters of this book and particularly at the concluding ones written some eighteen years ago. So many of the friends who appear in them can now only do so as memories. One has moved up into the front rank and the figures thin out. Jemima most sadly of all. Charlot. Bob.

  And that Micawber-like voice no longer booms. In his last letter to me Mr Wilkie quoted the gravedigger’s song: ‘Age, with his stealing steps.’

  There are now three Lampreys instead of five. I keep quite closely in touch with them. The most preposterous calamities, as well as very serious ones, continue to befall them. I wish we didn’t live half the world away from each other but there, that’s the way things have fallen out and with every letter I seem to hear those unmistakeable voices hailing me from the Kentish hills above West Malling or from somewhere on the fringes of the Devon moorlands or above the remotest Highland coastline or inland from Perth in Western Australia.