Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime

Gaboriau was the inspiration for the 19th century’s bestselling crime novel, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, written by New Zealander Fergus Hume. It was his first novel. ‘I tried to get it published, but every one to whom I offered it refused to even look at the manuscript on the ground that no Colonial could write anything worth reading.’ Five thousand copies of the book were published at the author’s expense in Melbourne in 1886; subsequently an estimated million copies have sold around the world. Hume moved to England and continued writing detective novels for more than 30 years, but never with the same blockbuster success.

The maturity of the genre came in a prolific golden age of short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. Empty waiting rooms and a threatened medical practice inspired the Scotsman to begin writing about a super-sleuth based on the special deductive skills of consulting surgeon Dr Joseph Bell, at the Edinburgh Infirmary where he trained. Sherlock Holmes was given life in A Study in Scarlet in 1887. Over 40 years, through 56 short stories and four novels, he would become the world’s greatest, and arguably most eccentric, detective. He was a cocaine addict, prone to ‘scraping away’ at his violin, and to prolonged periods lying prostrate on the couch in fits of depression. He was an alter ego to his creator, the huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ arch-philistine Conan Doyle, and an anathema to most conservative Victorians, yet his power to capture the popular imagination was phenomenal. His pyrotechnic displays of detection won him cult-hero status.

Conan Doyle’s synthesis of existing approaches was superb. He adopted Poe and Gaboriau’s admiring narrator, creating his own faithful retainer, Dr John H. Watson. He eschewed the terror of Poe’s Gothic tales, but made high art of his conventions. His sleuth, an upper-class egotist like Auguste Dupin, was emotionally stilted, faintly misogynistic (if not misanthropic), and an amateur rather than a professional detective. He was an urban dweller living in a sleuthing ménage with his narrator. He observed the smallest clues, developed a psychological profile of the perpetrator, and drew on an awe-inspiring breadth of empirical knowledge. If Poe’s Dupin gave shape to Sherlock Holmes, then the complex twists and turns of Gaboriau’s stories suggested Conan Doyle’s consummate puzzle plots. He remains one of the greatest and most original exponents of the intricately woven whodunit. With flair, he fashioned the conventions of the guessing game between writer and reader into rules. The diverse settings for his multifarious plots gave weight to the words of Sherlock Holmes in ‘The Adventure of the Copper Beeches’: ‘It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.’ Crime could be close at hand; its location was in the complexities of human psychology.

Because public pressure foiled Conan Doyle’s attempt in 1893 to kill off Sherlock Holmes by pushing him and his nemesis Professor Moriarty over a waterfall, the sleuth lived much longer than his creator ever intended. In fact, the short-story form was in decline by 1927 when The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes brought this famous career to an end. Conan Doyle’s influence was immense, as was the part he played in a British-based literary lineage that included G. K. Chesterton, Edgar Wallace and others. In what could have been wasteland years between the two World Wars, the genre flourished, and, remarkably, the chief architects of this classical era of detective fiction were women.

On the surface the four Queens of Crime, as they became known, seemed to be conventional upper-class women with values rooted in the ‘smiling and beautiful countryside’ and lives untouched by their fetish subject, murder. But the conventions of the whodunit offered these very private women a perfect cover. When Agatha Christie introduced Hercule Poirot in The Mysterious Affair of Styles in 1920, she invested in the book little more of her private life than the knowledge of poisons she had gleaned from war work behind a hospital pharmacy counter in Torquay. There was even less of her in the wax-trimmed moustache-wearing, stout little Belgian with the egg-shaped head who became her dandified detective through 33 novels and 10 collections of short stories over more than 55 years. Death came easily to Agatha Christie, and Hercule Poirot irritated her intensely. She would have killed him off earlier, but he was the heir to Sherlock Holmes, a small man who became a superman in the public’s imagination.

Hercule Poirot may sometimes have hovered perilously between cardboard cut-out and eccentric Holmesian cliché, but Christie transcended his weaknesses by constructing fabulously intricate problem plots. She was mathematical in her plotting, but also deceptive, and her killer instinct left no one exempt. In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which catapulted her into prominence in 1926, she treacherously breached detective etiquette by making the trusted narrator the murderer. This violation only enhanced her profile, beginning her reign as one of the world’s greatest detective writers. Interestingly, her stories were local and almost over-brewed in their Englishness. They were set typically in rural English villages, like the fictional St Mary Mead, the home of Christie’s other iconic sleuth, Miss Jane Marple. This was a world at risk from the emerging economies of the 20th century, but in the 1920s and 1930s a habitat still existed for the country squire, his family, servants and fore-lock-tugging gardeners and tradesmen. This was where the privileged Christie lived, and it was familiar to, or at least a desirable fantasy for, many of her readers. Miss Marple made her appearance in the midst of this cosy ordinariness, knitting and gossiping her way through the solution to her first Murder at the Vicarage in 1930. This elderly, mystery-solving spinster began as a bloodless archaism, severe, blue-eyed, frail and wearing a black lace cap and mittens, but she would update herself through 12 novels, becoming warmer, wittier and more human. No other author has given so much snooping talent to a female figure of such advanced years, and created such a charismatic character.

Agatha Christie’s writing followed the strict detective novel formula, with a tightly structured beginning, a middle that explored the possibilities of the plot, and an end that neatly tied everything up. This rigid form gave her absolute control. But in 1926 her own life was less conveniently scripted. In the wake of her much-loved mother’s death and her dashing military husband’s elopement with one of her acquaintances, she disappeared. Her car was found mysteriously abandoned in a chalk pit. She would be discovered 10 days later, at a Harrogate spa, checked into the hotel under the surname of her husband’s mistress, Nancy Neele. The English press at the time accused her of orchestrating the event to promote sales of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, her first book published by Collins. Although she began a new life with archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan, whom she married in 1930, the events surrounding her separation and divorce from Archibald Christie remained a mystery. Her autobiography describes the incident in terms of a mental breakdown or fugue, which seems a likely explanation for the disappearance of the intensely publicity-shy author. But publicity it did generate. The civilian response to police calls to mount a nationwide manhunt was almost unprecedented. Among the hundreds who searched for Agatha Christie was a young woman called Dorothy Sayers.

In 1923, Whose Body? introduced Sayers’ foppish, monocle-wearing Lord Peter Wimsey. Operating as an amateur detective with friendly Inspector Charles Parker of Scotland Yard and manservant Bunter, Wimsey would work out whodunit and how in 11 novels and 21 short stories. There was much of Dorothy Sayers in the make-up, or rather make-believe, of her detective, and this is probably why she fell so famously in love with him. He was a projection of her fantasies. Wimsey was hugely rich and it gave her pleasure to spend his money for him. ‘When I was dissatisfied with my single unfurnished room, I took a luxurious flat for him in Piccadilly,’ she wrote in 1936. ‘When my cheap rug got a hole in it, I ordered him an Aubusson carpet. When I had no money to pay my bus fare I presented him with a Daimler Double Six…and when I felt dull I let him drive it.’

Wimsey began almost as a figure of farce, a caricature in his snobbish, over-mannered elegance, but he would evolve into an admirable man. He and Bunter were inspired in part by humorist and writer P.G. Wodehouse’s bungling Bertie Wooster and gentleman’s gentleman, Jeeves. But Sayers put existing models of the detective under a magnifying glass. Where his predecessors were mostly upper-class gentlemen, Wimsey was a blue-blooded aristocrat, the second son of the 15th Duke of Denver. He was educated at Eton, taking his degree, as Sayers had, at Oxford, where he received a First in history. His breeding was impeccable and his eccentricities refined to a high art. He was a talented musician, a collector of ancient books, and a connoisseur of fine wines, food, fashion and fast cars. Even his athletic prowess was consummate. At university he played cricket for Oxford, and when in sleuthing mode he dangled effortlessly from ropes off buildings. Only in visualizing his appearance did Sayers show restraint. Perhaps he could be called nondescript with his tow-coloured hair, beak-like nose and modest stature.

Wimsey’s life was vastly different from that of his creator. Dorothy Sayers’ first two detective novels were written during a difficult period. In 1921 she became infatuated with writer-journalist John Cournos, a man not prepared to return her love. She rebounded into an even less appropriate match with motorcar enthusiast Bill White, who, after a brief fling, left her pregnant and unmarried. Although she was a modern woman earning her living as a copywriter for Benson’s Advertising Agency, she was also a conservative and ultimately devout High Church Anglican. She was the only child of older parents. Her father had been the chaplain of Christ Church, Oxford, and headmaster of the choir school. She felt unable to tell her parents, in their 70s, about the arrival of their grandson, John Anthony, in 1924. As a result she kept the baby secret, fostering him with her cousin Ivy Shrimpton. Her relationships with Cournos and White were never made public, and neither was the fact that she had an illegitimate son. Even when she wed older Fleet Street journalist Mac Fleming in 1926, she lived a double life divided between her flat in London and country home in Witham. Mac, who left paid work because of illness soon after they married, was part of her provincial life and many of her London friends never knew he existed.

Unlike Agatha Christie, Sayers created her sleuth to pay the bills, and the same was true for another of the reigning Queens of Crime, Margery Allingham. Younger than her two co-rulers, and something of a prodigy, she came from a working literary family of writer-journalists and editors. She was eight when her first story was published in her aunt’s magazine; her first novel, Blackkerchief Dick, came out in 1923 when she was 19. The White Cottage Mystery, her first story with a detective theme, was serialized in the Daily Express before it was produced as a novel in 1927, but it was not until The Crime at Black Dudley was published in 1929 that she had her first real success. It was in this book that she introduced her enigmatic Albert Campion. He began as a relatively minor figure, but when he captured the imagination and endorsement of her American publishers he was duly plucked from the chorus to become a star. There is more than a whiff of Wimsey and Wooster in Campion’s demeanour, and he may have been created as a spoof of the archetypal silly-ass sleuth. His pedigree was the most illustrious yet, because of his connection to royalty, although his exact relationship to the throne was never made specific. In fact, very little about this slippery snoop’s identity was specific. He had an assumed name, and there were other aliases. He was even physically ambiguous. His voice was described as idiotic and effete. A wiry albino-blond with buckteeth, he wore horn-rimmed spectacles and had a blank, unintelligent stare, but he was also heralded as a woman magnet.

Campion began as a modish young man-about-town with no serious intentions, but this was a smokescreen. In reality he moved easily between nobility and the criminal underworld to solve his crimes. Although a freelance government agent, and therefore seemingly on the right side of the law, his underworld connections were as close as his lugubrious valet, Magersfontein Lugg, who appeared first in Mystery Mile, in 1930. Lugg was a reformed cat burglar and borstal jail-bird, with a rich cockney accent and amusing turn of phrase. He would become the absent-minded Campion’s minder and nanny. Allingham wrote another 17 novels and 20 short stories with Campion as her hero-sleuth. Like Wimsey, he developed into a more complex and compelling figure as the novels progressed. Her plots improved along with her characters, but their strength remained in the element of risk rather than the intellectual puzzle plot. She created tension by evoking a sense of fear and foreboding that could be as disturbing as violence. Witchcraft and the occult were the themes in a number of plots. Her own connections to spiritualism began in her youth when she said Blackkerchief Dick was communicated to her at a séance. In her later years she was drawn to religion, studying sorcery and black magic with an interest intensified by the occult’s long history in her local area.

Margery Allingham hoped she might make a career for herself on the stage. In 1920, she began an acting course at London’s Regent Street Polytechnic. Speech therapy and drama classes cured her childhood stutter, but acting was not the profession for this shy woman who found speaking in public an ordeal. The theatre remained a lifelong passion, and introduced her to Philip Youngman Carter. The pair had their first date at The Old Vic theatre in London. Together they attended countless stage productions, became secretly engaged in 1922, and married in 1928. A love of the theatre linked all the Queens of Crime, but none loved it more than Ngaio Marsh, the last to join this criminal quartet. She may well have sat in the same West End productions as Margery Allingham, but this was not all they shared. Allingham’s The Crime at Black Dudley bears the closest fingerprint to Ngaio Marsh’s A Man Lay Dead. Before she began her murderous weekend’s writing, Ngaio had been reading a detective novel from the local lending library. Later she remembered that it may have been an Agatha Christie or a Dorothy Sayers, but it was probably the residue of Margery Allingham’s plot that stayed in her mind as she wrote.

In The Crime at Black Dudley, a homicide explodes the gaiety of a weekend party in a musty-dusty manor house in remote coastal Suffolk. After dinner, a bejewelled 15th-century Italian dagger is used in a ritual game that has ancient associations with the house. In a blackened room, the blade is passed between guests in a frenzied rite that combines the anxiety of a pass-the-parcel bomb with the sensory deprivation of blind-man’s-buff. When light is restored, the host’s invalid uncle, Colonel Coombe, is found murdered and an important document is missing from his papers; the house guests are held hostage by a criminal gang seeking the document’s return. It is pathologist Dr George Abbershaw who uncovers the killer, assisted by the mysterious Albert Campion. Abbershaw was almost certainly intended to be Allingham’s detective, but he was upstaged by the super-sleuth-spoof, Campion.

Although Ngaio and Allingham have similar plots, their execution is quite different. With each sinister ingredient, Allingham twists the tension of her story tighter. Her mansion is a rotting labyrinth of antique rooms and corridors connected by an ancient network of rat-infested secret passageways. Guests vanish through panelled walls, reappear behind fireplaces and are beaten up by Teutonic henchmen. Her host is a mask-wearing criminal mastermind, and his staff and associates some of Europe’s most villainous thugs. The situation becomes combustible and burn the house nearly does, with the guests locked in an upper chamber. Salvation comes when their desperate choruses of ‘viewhalloo’ attract the Monewdon Hunt. Ngaio’s treatment, by comparison, is blander but more believable. Her suspense hinges on whodunit and how. Already her special talent for visualizing scenes is evident, as is her superb sense of dramatic timing.

In years to come Ngaio Marsh would cringe at the thought of her first novel, with its barely plausible storyline, shallow characterization and confined setting, but it was her entrée to crime fiction writing. In fact, both A Man Lay Dead and The Crime at Black Dudley exemplify the cosy detective novel form perfectly. Claustrophobic in every way, they unfold with a small group of characters, in a single main setting, over a short period of time. The exclusion of the outside world allows the writer to create a controlled environment where clues, red herrings, victims, innocents and villains can be paraded before the reader free of contamination. There can be no loose ends and no escapes. The isolated manor house is a favourite setting, but equally it could be a village, a train, a boat, a hospital, a theatre, or any discrete space that brings a hand-picked group of eccentrics together and locks the door. The cosy comes with a property box of stock characters. There is the prominent family with its multiple tensions, the vamp, the vicar, the rake, the student, the professor, the spinster, the young poseur, the doctor, the adventurer, the foreigner, the writer, the untouched young woman, and, of course, the murderer. For murder it mostly is, because the participants play for the highest stakes: the death penalty. Cosy plots are convoluted, so the reader is presented with a multiplicity of possible scenarios, each stopping at a dead end until the detective leads the way. The detective enters this amphitheatre of anxiety in a sanctified role to restore the balance of good over evil. He or she is neither judge nor executioner but high priest of order, exposing the wrongdoer, who is sacrificed to reaffirm society’s rules. In 1942, writer and critic Nicholas Blake described the detective as ‘the Fairy Godmother of the twentieth century folk-myth’. Certainly this figure played a magical part in one of the century’s favourite bedtime stories.

‘I thought it would be fun to create someone who hadn’t got tickets tied to him,’ explained Ngaio Marsh in a 1978 radio interview for the BBC. She was talking about the genesis of her detective, Roderick Alleyn. She had visited Scotland and while staying with friends selected the popular Scottish name Roderick; and not long before she began writing she went to Dulwich College where her father had gone to school, and chose the surname of its founder, Elizabethan actor Edward Alleyn. So her detective was christened before he was born. His character was gestating in her mind as she tinkered with the coals in her London grate. She was thinking of a more ordinary man than the set of silly-assed sleuths who tweaked waxed moustaches, repositioned monocles or stared blankly over buckteeth. She wanted to create a believable professional policeman who could move comfortably between the lower echelons and upper-class circles where many of her stories would be set. He was to be an ‘attractive, civilised man,’ the kind, she later wrote, ‘with whom it would be pleasant to talk but much less pleasant to fall out’. So Alleyn was born, ‘tall and thin with an accidental elegance about him and a fastidiousness’. His hair is dark, his eyes are grey ‘with corners that turned down. They looked as if they would smile easily, but his mouth didn’t.’ After a long look at her first detective, Sir Hubert Handesley’s niece, Angela North, decides Alleyn is ‘the sort they knew would “do” for house-parties’. He is the younger son of a landed family in Buckinghamshire, has been educated at Eton, employed briefly by the Foreign Office, and now works for the Yard. His brother is a baronet in the diplomatic corps, and his mother, Lady Alleyn of Danes Lodge, Bossicote, breeds Alsatians. His background is impeccable rather than impossible, and his worst habit is his irritating tendency to make banal comments and facetious jokes.

Like his sleuthing peers, Alleyn would mature, but not as much because he began more plausibly. There would be excursions abroad, but his natural habitat would remain the English hothouse cosy where traditional values were just a murder away from being restored. The anarchy of war, the devastation of pandemic, the General Strike of 1926, the Great Depression, and the rise of Communism and Fascism with their catastrophic episodes of genocide never properly enter his cloistered world where a single death can still be utterly shocking.

Explaining the extraordinary demand for the detective novel, Margery Allingham wrote: ‘When the moralists cite the modern murder mystery as evidence of an unnatural love of violence in a decadent age, I wonder if it is nothing of the sort, but rather a sign of a popular instinct for order and form in a period of sudden and chaotic change […] There is something deeply healthy in the implication that to deprive a human being of his life is not only the most dreadful thing one can do to him, but also that it matters to the rest of us.’ Faced with the flux of a rapidly changing world, readers sought intellectual escape in problem plots where sanitized death teased the minds of anyone from a housewife to a judge. While global war and economic slump eroded the class system and beat at the bastions of the family manor house, the detective novel offered fictional stability. Anybody with a stake in the restoration of traditional order was a potential reader. The detective novel portrayed a world of proscriptive hierarchies and reassuring ritual. It assumed a reasoned universe based on polarities of right and wrong where anarchy occasionally erupted but normality was always restored. And no one could be a more chivalrous representative of the status quo than that ‘perfect specimen of English manhood’, Roderick Alleyn.

As an orderly man in an ordered form, he required little personal revelation from Ngaio Marsh. Like the other Queens of Crime, Ngaio shunned uncomfortable publicity. She seemed largely conformist, from a conservative background, writing in an era when women were expected to behave conventionally. The crime novel kept up appearances by preserving her from the necessity of exploring difficult feelings. The genre exposed to public scrutiny her intellect and literary skills rather than her emotions. Ngaio was the most secretive of this very self-protective group. As crime novelist commentator Jessica Mann writes, ‘she exemplifies in its most extreme form the reticence of the crime novelist…[she] never wrote anything which touched her emotions more deeply’ and ‘one senses withdrawal’.

Ngaio was the only Antipodean Crime Queen, and although she often left New Zealand’s parochial fish bowl, she never escaped it. This made her, as she described it, ‘a looker on in England’. But she was also something of an Anglophile outsider at home. Colonization creates cultural refugees and Ngaio was one of these, a wanderer between worlds, never belonging completely to any place or culture. But displacement does not explain the intensity of her need for privacy. In 32 novels written over nearly 50 years, she exposed countless villains, but never herself. She was a doyenne of concealment, knowing exactly what evidence was incriminating and who would point the finger. There are, however, clues to understanding this complex and elusive woman. Ngaio felt strong emotions. ‘I guess I fell in love with them,’ she said of the aristocratic family she stayed with in Britain, and love is as good a place as any to begin a mystery.

Ngaio’s rusty freighter-cum-passenger ship steamed up the Thames, docking at Tilbury in the early summer of 1928. She was ecstatic about her first visit to England. ‘We were bewilderingly gay,’ she remembered, ‘I got the tag end of a very ravished but very wonderful 1920s in London.’ She went immediately to stay with her friends Helen and Tahu Rhodes, and their burgeoning family of five children. On her arrival at their magnificent Georgian mansion, Ngaio was greeted by a joke ‘For Sale on Easy Terms’ sign, which set the tone of her stay. Ngaio found the Rhodes family’s theatricality, their irrepressible enthusiasm for practical jokes, for putting on costumes, for making up and acting up, irresistible. She would live with them on and off while in England; first at Alderbourne Manor near Gerrards Cross in Buckinghamshire, and later in London.

This would become a ménage à trois of sorts, held together by the infatuation of the two women. Helen, known as Nelly, was the eldest daughter of Lord Plunket, who had been Governor of New Zealand from 1904 to 1910. In 1916, she married her handsome soldier husband, Captain Tahu Rhodes, at an English church packed with wounded soldiers who had been driven to the service in Red Cross vehicles from the New Zealand hospital at Walton-on-Thames.

The pattern of Ngaio’s weekend stays with the couple had begun when they returned to New Zealand at the end of the First World War. Tahu Rhodes, a childhood friend, owned Meadowbank, a large sheep station at Ellesmere, about 30 kilometres south-east of her hometown of Christchurch. Through her fund-raising activities in the theatre, Ngaio picked up the threads of her acquaintance with Tahu and was introduced to his wife, Nelly. The women’s friendship became lifelong and binding.

In New Zealand, Ngaio had wandered listlessly from one touring theatre production to another, searching for something permanent and sustaining. She had acted in, written and directed plays; she had been to art school and produced paintings for exhibitions; she had written articles for the Sun newspaper. But after the Rhodeses’ return to England in 1927, her enthusiasm for bit-jobs diminished in direct proportion to her desire to travel ‘Home’. Much more than a literal home, England was for her a cultural pantheon presided over by her giant of literary gods, William Shakespeare. When it came, the invitation from the Rhodeses burst like a blaze of fireworks across a night sky. She was rapturous. Her parents were the only tug on her emotions. However, her doting bank-clerk father, Henry Marsh, and his economizing wife, Rose, magnanimously scrambled to pay their only child’s passage to England. It meant a more spartan life than usual, but the opportunity for Ngaio to travel and stay with such illustrious friends abroad was impossible to miss.

Alderbourne, with its vast number of rooms and workforce—which included a butler, a footman, a full domestic staff, plus a nanny and a lady’s maid—was a shock for Ngaio. The Rhodes family had returned to England to economize. They had found their big house, large staff and lavish life of weekend parties unsustainable in New Zealand. To Ngaio, however, Alderbourne Manor seemed luxurious. She waited for the ominous day when the Rhodes family ‘bandwagon’, as she called it, with its English ‘rebore’ and fresh ‘coat of paint’, lurched into another period of desperate insolvency. In the meantime, she took her seat.

A photograph taken on a Rhodes family holiday in Kent shows the easy comfort of the family group and their coterie of perpetual guests. Four high-spirited children, wearing swimsuits, sit in the front row with a favourite dog, while another is carried piggyback. Behind them are the adults, in soft suits that pull and pucker. On the far right, slightly apart, stands Tahu Rhodes. He was a captain in the Grenadier Guards, and there is still a trace of formality in the slicked-back black hair, prominent moustache and heavy-featured, swarthy good looks. Beside him is the crop-haired, trouser-clad, boyish figure of Ngaio. She was nearly 6 feet (1.8 metres) tall, and even in her 30s she carried the imprint of youth and a touch of the awkward teenager in her lanky stature. She was striking, with strong rather than conventionally beautiful features, a prominent nose, dark close-set eyes and tightly wavy dark hair. Toppy Blundell Hawkes stands open-faced and smiling between Ngaio and Nelly. He was a good-natured English farm cadet who became a favourite after staying with the Rhodes family in New Zealand. Nelly is squat and somewhat plain, but the warmth of her personality is evident in her face, which beams broadly. A 1920s hat is pulled down tightly on her head, and she is wearing a full-length, flecked dress-suit, which is comfortable rather than elegant. What is evident in the photograph is their delight at being together on holiday.

Ngaio joined the Society of Authors, and at Alderbourne Manor, in the midst of a noisy household of children, wrote syndicated accounts of her travels for newspapers in New Zealand. She hoped journalism would make her more independent of her parents’ finances. The first of many articles, under the pen name ‘A New Canterbury Pilgrim’, was published in the Christchurch Press on 1 September 1928. She began by describing her departure from New Zealand. ‘I know of no experience that compares with the adventure of setting out on one’s travels…for me, at least, the office of Thomas Cook and Son, Christchurch, will always be the enchanted parlour whose doors open straight into Wonderland.’ Like many creative colonial women of her generation, Ngaio felt travelling to Britain and Europe was like slipping into a magical parallel universe. New Zealand offered few opportunities in writing, art or the theatre, and, for women particularly, these were isolating, often desperate pursuits. Even after the First World War, remnants of Victorian provincialism hung like a miasma over cities such as Christchurch. Expatriate Australian artist and writer Stella Bowen described Christchurch’s sister city Adelaide as ‘a queer little backwater of intellectual timidity’ which, ‘isolated by three immense oceans…lies…prettyish, banal, and filled to the brim with an anguish of boredom’. This was what Ngaio felt she was leaving. It was also a chance to escape the confines of her relationship with her parents, to become independent—an adult even—and define herself as someone new.

Her first stop on the long sea voyage, which would take nearly eight weeks, was Sydney, where she witnessed a half-span of the harbour bridge going up. She saw a production of Henry VIII put on in Newton by her old actor-manager friend Allan Wilkie, and went to the city’s ‘grandiloquent’ state gallery which stands on a hill flanked by giant statues of snorting steeds bearing symbolic figures of ‘war and peace’. In the English section of the gallery, she was taken by the work of Impressionist Laura Knight, and in the Australian, by the Post-Impressionist Margaret Preston. ‘They are brilliantly painted,’ she wrote of Preston’s stilllifes, ‘they seem to reveal the very spirit of flowers without a touch of over-representation or sentimentality. Her sense of pattern is…inspiring.’ In the colonies Ngaio’s taste in art was modern, and her discussion of Preston perceptive, but in European centres that had wrestled with Cubist deconstruction, Dada nihilism and the psychosis of Surrealism, it was traditional. Her final visit was to the new Cabaret-Romanos, where she found heterogeneous humanity dancing cheek-to-cheek to the ‘muted “Blues” of the best Jazz in Sydney’.

In Hobart, she shuddered at photographs of the ‘dreadful instruments’ of penal correction used in the former convict prison and noted the sad demise of Aboriginal culture in the face of English settlement. She found Melbourne cooler and more decorous than hot-blooded, sun-baked Sydney. Here she again visited the state gallery, noting the work of late 19th-century ‘moderns’ like idiosyncratic Symbolist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, and the painting of French and English Impressionists such as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Frank Brangwyn, John Singer Sargent and Sir William Orpen. Again, her taste was conservative. The highlight of her stay was a lavish production, by the Melba-Williamson Grand Opera Company, of Puccini’s unfinished Turandot. ‘The audience at the opera in Melbourne is a very festive one and the gorgeous theatre coats made a brave show against the florid brilliance of the gilt walls. Many of the men wore tails and white ties.’ Ngaio relished the rituals of class and culture and felt it gave the event dignity. She was naturally attracted to the theatrical, even camp accessories of upper-crust society, and this fascination lasted. Her observation of aristocratic manners was acute, and her belief in them shifted from born-again conviction to good-humoured scepticism.

The liver-coloured, coal-burning Balranald was making a last long sea voyage to the wreckers’ yard, and Ngaio’s berth was cramped, yet shipboard life appealed to her. She eagerly participated in deck games and dressing up for performances and parties, and delighted in the company of the other passengers. Already Ngaio was fascinated by the pursuit of people-watching, especially in a confined space. ‘I have always had a vague and ill-informed interest in crowd-psychology, and never was there a better opportunity of studying it.’ She could watch people with impunity—‘Australians who wanted to see the world, Americans who have seen it and insisted on telling you about it, Swedish, Greek, Armenians and Italian wanderers…South Africans’—and share her amusing observations with her Christchurch readers. It took three weeks to reach the coast of Africa, and by then much of the food on board was stale or bad. The water made people sick and, opening a folded slice of cold meat, she ‘found it encrusted with small shells’. Ngaio decided ‘to cut loose’ and eat in Durban.

She was enchanted by the city’s strangeness. ‘The first excitement we [Ngaio and a fellow passenger] encountered was a row of Zulu rickshaw men with their amazing headdresses of quills, feathers, and horns, their fur tippets and painted legs.’ The rickshaw ride to the hotel through sunny streets that thronged with ‘Hindoos, Kaffirs, Zulus…white people…[and] beautiful Indian women in ample robes of vivid blue and scarlet and cerise’ was as colourful as it was exhilarating. On a hill, the driver drew himself onto the shafts of the rickshaw and ‘we free-wheeled at an alarming speed while he rang his cow bell at the crossings’. They recovered from their ordeal by drinking coffee on the loggia of the hotel ‘and looking on at the pageant of the streets’. Ngaio saw Sybil Thorndike, her husband Lewis Casson, and their small daughter in a revival of The Liars by Henry Arthur Jones, and in a packed Indian market she bought the food she had promised herself. For sixpence she filled a colossal basket with pineapples, oranges, pawpaws, succulent tangerines and gigantic grapefruit. Ngaio ached to paint the scene, with its bustle of humanity and kaleidoscope of costumes, produce, deeply shaded little shops and brilliant lengths of silk, but she had time only to take a photograph and make a quick sketch on the back of an envelope. She wrote about the market in her ‘Pilgrim’ article before she painted it. Increasingly she was capturing the world around her in words rather than paint, but she pictured it vividly with an artist’s eye.

Durban’s racism troubled her. She had qualms about taking a rickshaw ride, and described with contempt the treatment of a black man who ‘ran in front of three sullen-looking Dutch youths, who turned on him savagely’. She concluded: ‘I remember Mr J H Curle’s contention that it is the under-bred white who, at bedrock, is responsible for the “colour question”‘, and this is what she believed. Ngaio was sensitive about race and culture. As a Pakeha in New Zealand, she had seen the plight of Maori in the face of colonization, and she felt for their loss of culture, language and land. She saw pathos in the position of the ‘aboriginals who have seen the coming of the English and the changing of their ways’. Ngaio was born a Victorian, her liberalism was flawed and limited, and her thinking sometimes straitjacketed by convention and class, but she despised racial prejudice. The final picture she painted of Durban was one that disturbed her. It was the fading image of ‘a grinning kaffir boy’ dancing on the wharf. He had made friends with children on the boat. ‘“He’s a nice nigger boy,” said a little girl. “He does what I tell him, ‘Dance boy’.” He danced and waved his arms obediently…till we slid away and the children lost interest in him.’

From Durban, the Balranald sailed in heavy seas down the coast of Africa to Cape Town, where Ngaio met Uncle Freddie, one of Henry Marsh’s six brothers. Their father, a tea broker in the days of clipper ships, had died suddenly leaving his widow in a small Georgian house near Epping with a family of 10 children to bring up. The sons, desperate for financial independence and opportunity, left England for Canada, South Africa and New Zealand, adventurers out to make their fortunes. ‘There seems to have been no thought of university or profession for any of them,’ Ngaio later wrote. ‘The Colonies, it was felt, were the thing.’

Henry learned Chinese at London University for a position in the Hong Kong-Shanghai Bank, but this plan was cut short by a bout of pleurisy and an invigorating year on the veldt of South Africa. A solution to his employment problem came from his father’s eldest brother, who was Governor of Hong Kong. While this uncle was staying in New Zealand, he secured the offer of a good position for his nephew with the Colonial Bank. When Henry arrived, however, the unthinkable happened: the bank crashed and he was forced to take a humble clerk’s job with the Bank of New Zealand. He remained in the same position for the rest of his life. Ngaio’s Uncle Freddie, now permanent secretary to the Governor-General’s Fund in Cape Town, was luckier. He and his family proudly escorted Ngaio around the sights of the city, which included the museum, the ancient colonial house of Koopmans-de Wet, the ‘old Curfew bell that…call[ed] the slaves in from their work’, and the ‘ill-tailored statue’ of former prime minister and colonizing magnate, Cecil Rhodes.

A sultry yellow sun beat unrelentingly down as they steamed along the Gold Coast. ‘When the land breeze gets up it fans us with the accumulated heat of all Africa,’ Ngaio wrote, ‘but tomorrow we turn away towards Las Palmas, and sail out of the tropics.’

When she finally reached the silver-grey misty seas of England she could hardly believe it. ‘Just before dawn the cabin steward made an isolated gesture. For the first time on the voyage he brought me a cup of tea. He said…the water had been filtered…I thanked him warmly and had drunk half the tea when I found the rest of the cup was full of a thick, viscid, grey silt.’

It was with a huge sense of relief and excitement that she met the Rhodes family on the wharf. They drove her through streets that were noisy monuments to history after the colonial outposts and cicada-serenaded towns she knew. She was infatuated. Her first excursions from Alderbourne Manor into London were dream-like. ‘There is the same fascination here,’ she wrote, ‘as there was in the brilliance and heat of the Indian market in Durban.’ One of the early stage shows she saw was Agatha Christie’s Alibi, which was a ‘detective drama, remarkable for the really brilliant acting of Mr Charles Laughton as M. Poirot’. She emerged afterwards onto warm summer-evening streets to see ‘men in their evening dress, not wearing over coats or hats…[looking] exotic and important’ and women with cloaks tied around their necks who seemed ‘to move as though they are walking across a stage’.

London was a wonderland above and below ground. She was thrilled by the thronging Strand, and by Trafalgar Square, where humming multitudes of people pushed past iconic stone buildings and vast public sculptures. She delighted in Piccadilly Circus, where scarlet buses and black taxis hurtled. ‘This, Londoners say, is the hub of the world, and it is here that I love to stand, my feet on London stones, in the very heart of that amazing labyrinth.’ She relished the experience of diving down moving stairways, travelling through ‘strangely scented warm tunnels’ and coming out on subterranean platforms, to take the tube. ‘As we gathered way, all these figures moved very slightly and spasmodically, for all the world like…masked jiggling puppets…As one does in the tubes, I sat idly speculating about my fellow travellers for three miles under the earth.’ Mesmerized by people and places, she was looking at the city with the eyes of an outsider and it set her imagination on fire.

Ngaio was with the Rhodeses only a matter of months before the ‘bandwagon’ carried her off to Monte Carlo. She watched in astonishment as the family planned to spend a windfall given to them by Nelly’s mother. Money worries hung over Alderbourne Manor, but Monte Carlo was chosen as an escape and a place where they could recover financially by making a fortune at the gaming tables. ‘A domestic roulette was put into instant use.’ They would take turns at spinning the wheel and record the patterns of numbers in order to devise a sensible and scientific system. Ngaio was sceptical. So, she suspected, were they. But they were having fun, and the fun was intoxicating. There were Nelly Rhodes, Ngaio, and Betty Cotterill, a student friend of Ngaio’s who also stayed for a while with the Rhodes family. The Channel was ‘grey and nasty and was covered with white horses’ when they left Dover, but the boat was intriguing. She could observe again: ‘Wondering about the nationality, private lives, and destinations of the people who are pouring up the wind-raked gangway on to the alarmingly small vessel that is to herd you all together.’ Ngaio enjoyed the drama of arriving in Calais, which was like ‘stepping on to the stage of an impromptu musical comedy’.

But it was the train beside the wharf that arrested her attention. It was ‘the famous Blue Train,’ she explained, ‘cherished by all weavers of detective fiction on the Continental scale’. Already she was thinking of murder on an overnight express. The Blue Train carried them south from austere Paris past fields of vines and ‘pointed ranks’ of black cypress trees, through hills and heat-baked yellow houses to the Riviera. ‘Monte Carlo is beautiful in a lavish carefree sort of way that rather took me aback,’ she recorded. From the balcony of their adjoining rooms they looked down on a ‘cheerful little street’. Subdued sounds of horses’ hooves, church bells, motor horns ‘and the endless lisp of quiet voices’ drifted up in a muted haze of warmth and colour. The casino, by contrast, was a cacophony of Baroque flamboyance. Nude men supported shields; cornucopias spilled forth; voluptuous ‘larger-than-life ladies’ languished in pastoral landscapes. The colours were a muted confection of chocolate, ochre, ‘baby blues and pinks that have gone off’, and everything that could be gilded was. The extravagance of the roof and walls was an entrée to the hushed drama of the floor. ‘Roulette in extremis is a disease,’ announced Ngaio, after describing the many English habituées who came daily, their faces distorted by alcohol and drugs. She savoured the detail of hawk-like men and women who sat expressionless, watching their fortunes dance up and down on the back of an ivory ball.

‘I usually start with a group of people,’ Ngaio told a radio interviewer, explaining how she began a book. ‘I get interested in a group of people…and think about them, their relationships…quite often, just start writing about them…Which of these people is capable of a crime of violence?…Under what circumstances would they be likely to commit it?’

At Monte Carlo, Ngaio was already looking for potential suspects.

She is over middle-age and…enormous. Her face, heavily enamelled, dangles in pockets from the bones of her skull. At three in the afternoon, when I first saw her, she was dressed in jonquil-coloured satin trimmed with marabou, and on her head was a golden cap covered in sparkling diamanté and garnished with an osprey about two feet high. In her claws she carried stacks of mills plaques worth more than £8-each, and in a few minutes she had trebled them…she gathered up her golden robes and swept over to the baccarrat [sic] table where she very quickly lost it all.

Ngaio’s party nicknamed this ‘enormous’ woman’s male counterpart ‘Dolly’, because he had minute hands and feet, a white moustache that looked as though it was stuck on with glue, and was ‘rigidly tailored and tight-waisted to such a degree that he could only move in little mechanical jerks’.

There was also a third sex at the tables that was more memorable than Ngaio was prepared to admit to ‘Pilgrim’ readers in 1928. It was not until she recalled the event in her autobiography Black Beech and Honeydew in 1966 that she mentioned a kind of woman that was ‘entirely new to me. The croupiers referred to the most dominant of them as “cette monsieur-dame”. She seemed to have quite a pleasant time of it, running her finger round inside her collar and settling her tie. She wore a sort of habit and was perhaps by [Christopher] Isherwood out of [Aldous] Huxley.’

The three women found the experience exhilarating. ‘We chose a table and hit Monte Carlo with our system.’ On the first evening they won so much that their purses bulged, but after a week they had lost nearly all their gains. A new tactic was devised. ‘We separated and we spent ages waiting for long runs on the even chances.’ They delighted in being together and free from restraints. In Christchurch, jealous rumours of an affair between Ngaio and Tahu Rhodes were whispered over teacups and behind theatre programmes, but it was the intimacy between Ngaio and Nelly Rhodes that was the glue.

Ngaio was captivated by her friend’s languid, aristocratic ease. Nelly was sure of her place, and had a liberty of spirit that came from privilege. Luxury was assumed, and delicacies ordered and served before balance books were totted. She was vague about practicalities and self-indulgent, but generous to a fault with others whether family coffers were full or empty. Ngaio’s childhood of genteel poverty was vastly different, and her social position more ambiguous. She could play the aristocrat, but she was not born one. For her the upper classes were a fiction, and travelling with Nelly to Monte Carlo was as full of wonder as waking up in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall or Vile Bodies. What Ngaio brought to their relationship was her effervescent wit, her theatricality and the sheer energy of her excitement at being away. ‘[They] called us the “Ladies who Laugh”,’ she wrote, ‘presumably because we were unable to manage the correct expressionless stare at the tables, and on the occasion when we disastrously lost all our plaques laughed helplessly until we cried.’

Nelly Rhodes and Betty Cotterill lost, then recovered to gain a little at the end. Ngaio was more fortunate. ‘I suddenly found I’d won on 15 en plein and made enough to buy a coat and skirt.’ In reality, the outfit she bought with her winnings was reminiscent of the ‘cette monsieur-dame‘ ensemble she later described in Black Beech. Whether Ngaio purchased this outfit to play fashionable-butch to Nelly’s languid-femme is impossible to know, because she destroyed any intimate record of their relationship. In her 20s Ngaio began burning correspondence that would elucidate any deeply felt emotional or physical nuance in her relationships. However, a photograph survives of Ngaio in her ‘cette monsieur-dame‘ dress, suggesting not just modish chic but a theatrical delight in camping it up and testing the boundaries of cross-dressing.

They arrived back as white frosts were beginning to settle on the lawns at Alderbourne Manor. It was cold reality after the excitement of the Riviera, and the New Year of 1929 ushered in a bleak winter. ‘We are in the middle of the greatest frost England has known since eighteen something,’ Ngaio told readers. ‘The woods, the fields, the streams are all frozen and silent, and this morning I found a robin—silent too, and stiff in the grass where he had fallen out of the dead-cold sky.’ In London there were warnings in the press against skating on the Thames, which ‘hundreds of these hardy English’ did anyway, and in a quadrangle at Cambridge people flocked to see a frozen fountain. Ngaio ignored the biting cold and relished the sights: Westminster Abbey with its unearthly collection of sightless statues, and the Tower of London emerging from a ‘thin morning mist’ so that ‘a turret shone out quite warm and clear while the underlying structure slipped away into a blue haze’. She drove through Windsor Park at sunset and watched the long, late ‘rays of light touch trees and turf with the colours of heraldry’.