Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime

They travelled ‘by buses, trains and coastal steamers’. The audiences were provincial and small, and the company lasted three months before it was disbanded. Rose had won a skirmish, but other battles were inevitable because Ngaio was not happy. Christchurch was claustrophobic and she was unsettled.

The bliss of touring was artificially prolonged when Kiore (Tor) King, a young woman Ngaio had become friendly with on the comedy tour, came to stay. Rose approved because King came from the right sort of family. Discussions with King about the theatre inspired Ngaio to write a piece called Little Housebound. ‘My mother must have exercised superb self-control during this period…she did not discourage us: I was writing.’ The play was almost a parody of Ngaio’s life. It was about breaking free, taking risks and stepping out into the world. Perhaps Rose Marsh was too close to see the parallel.

They decided to tour it through provincial towns in the North Island. A recovered Jimmy from the Rosemary Rees company was roped in to play the male role and they were ready. ‘Jimmy discovered that touring companies of five or more were allowed first-class railway accommodation at second-class fares.’ The mothers were invited to boost numbers and, not surprisingly, they came. Ngaio’s play, plus some sketches and recitations, was taken to Hastings and Havelock North. They had fun and made a modest profit. Ngaio was sad when the enterprise came to an end. Jimmy went to Australia to join the Marie Tempest Company, and Tor King to the Allan Wilkie Company. Once again, Ngaio was housebound.

It was her first vivid sense of getting away with the Allan Wilkie Company that Ngaio captured in Vintage Murder in 1937. ‘There were to be other tours with other companies,’ she wrote in Black Beech, ‘and many solitary train journeys in many parts of the world. In all of them, whenever I have found myself in a half-empty Pullman carriage I have repeopled it with those long-remembered companions.’ She dedicated the book to Allan Wilkie and his wife, ‘In memory of a tour in New Zealand’. ‘All the characters in this story are purely imaginary and bear no relation to any actual person,’ she wrote in the foreword, but this was the convention. Many years later, in a BBC radio interview, she would admit that Vintage Murder‘s Susan Max was based on an elderly Australian actress who was dresser for Mrs Wilkie. In the novel, Roderick Alleyn is in New Zealand on an enforced holiday for his health. In between sleeping and waking, he watches a group of dozing actors as his train hurries through the night.

For the hundredth time he opened his eyes to see the dim carriage-lamps and the rows of faces with their murky high-lights and cadaverous shadows…Opposite him was the leading man, large, kindly, swaying slightly with the movement of the long narrow-gauge carriage, politely resigned to discomfort. The bundle of rugs in the next seat…was Miss Susan Max, the character woman. An old trouper, Susan, with years of jolting night journeys behind her, first in this country, then Australia, and then up and down the provinces in England.

Susan Max has toured for 45 years. Two years before, she had held the sobbing Stephanie Vaughan in her arms when Surbonadier was shot at the Unicorn Theatre. After that murder investigation closed The Rat and Beaver, she joined Carolyn Dacres Comedy Company, which is now touring New Zealand. It is the gorgeous Carolyn’s birthday and they have planned a party for her on stage after the company’s opening night in Middleton (a fictional mid-North Island town). Cast and crew are invited, plus select guests. A trestle table is set up, loaded with food. In the middle is a nest of maidenhair fern and coloured lights mixed with exotic flowers. At the crowning moment a massive jeroboam of wine is to descend on a crimson cord and settle in the centrepiece. Everyone is assembled. For impact, Carolyn Dacres delays her entrance. She looks fabulous as Alleyn presents her with his portentous gift of a ‘he tiki’, a Maori symbol of fertility. The moment comes: Carolyn cuts the cord.

Something enormous…flashed down among them, jolting the table. Valerie Gaynes screaming. Broken glass and the smell of champagne. Champagne flowing over the white cloth. A thing like an enormous billiard ball embedded in the fern. Red in the champagne. Valerie Gaynes, screaming, screaming. Carolyn, her arm still raised, looking down. Himself [Alleyn], his voice, telling them to go away, telling Hambledon to take Carolyn away.

It is a horrifying spectacle: the bald head of actor-manager Alfred Meyer, squashed in the ferns and fairy lights under a huge jeroboam of wine.

Ngaio’s imagination was gaining momentum. She would develop a reputation for sticky ends. Some would seem hardly plausible, but her skill at picturing them silenced most sceptics. As P.D. James has commented, regarding the ingenuity of her murder methods, ‘Readers in the golden years demanded not only that the victim be murdered, but that he or she be mysteriously, intriguingly and bizarrely murdered…The method of death in a Ngaio Marsh novel tends to linger in the memory.’

While her ingenious murder methods became a trademark, Ngaio’s police interrogations could be much drier. It was here that some of the brilliant momentum she created in setting scenes and introducing characters reached a plateau and on occasions even a frustrating hiatus. The unusual thing about Vintage Murder is that although the story depends heavily on police interrogation, it remains fresh. Perhaps the newness of New Zealand for Alleyn seals its vitality. Convalescent, as Ngaio had been, he is abroad for a complete break. For the first time in her writing they swap places: Alleyn is a foreigner in her country. Ngaio knew what it felt like. ‘On my return to New Zealand after five years, I found myself looking at my own country, however superficially, from the outside, in.’

Ngaio could have chosen a more conventionally upper-class place for her detective to recuperate. He could have basked in the warmth of the Riviera, or enjoyed the buzz of the metropolis—Paris, Rome, Berlin—anywhere but the crisp stillness of a small mid-North Island town moving into winter. But although a murder mystery was traditionally pure entertainment, and not intended to be taken seriously, a clever writer like Ngaio had opinions, especially about New Zealand and its problematic relationship with Britain. Vintage Murder gave these their first proper airing. There is no Nigel Bathgate, so the central consciousness becomes Alleyn himself, and the story unfolds from his perspective. Whatever health breakdown he has had has transformed him: any remnant of silly-assed sleuth has gone. He is more considered, reflective and mature, but his seriousness is meted by a clever strain of humour that runs through the book. Alleyn is aware of his outsider status in relation to both Pakeha cultural cringe and Maori cultural difference.

His contribution to the case is welcomed by local police, because he knows the company of English actors involved. ‘It looks as if it’s an English case more than a New Zillund one, now, doesn’t it?’ says Sergeant Wade, sheepishly parodying his own accent. Alleyn is sensitive to the power dynamic. ‘“I suppose,” thought Alleyn, “I must give him an inferiority complex. He feels I’m criticising him all the time. If I don’t remember to be frightfully hearty and friendly, he’ll think I’m all English and superior.”‘ Pakeha New Zealanders feel second-rate around Alleyn. In spite of his politeness, he makes them aware of their difference. They are changing and losing touch with their English and European roots as the Maori have with their indigenous heritage. Pakeha ambivalence comes from the fact that New Zealand will never be their place of origin. Ngaio lampoons the Pakeha dilemma. Young Detective Inspector Packer hero-worships Alleyn in language she loathed. ‘“He looks like one of those swells in the English flicks,” [Packer] afterwards confided to his girl, “and he talks with a corker sort of voice. Not queeny, but just corker. I reckon he’s all right. Gosh, I reckon he’s a humdinger.”‘ Parker’s cringe is internalized, like Ngaio’s, and the same applied to many Pakeha New Zealanders of this era.

The position of Maori is less complicated because they are the indigenous people, and in some respects Ngaio’s treatment is more sympathetic. Alleyn is the first bicultural Golden Age detective. He attempts to understand the case according to Pakeha and Maori laws. It is Alfred Meyer who insults the sacredness of the he tiki on his wife’s birthday, and it is his head that is pulverized almost as soon as he does. Alleyn asks his cultured Maori confidant, Dr Rangi Te Pokiha, ‘Tell me,…if it’s not an impertinent question, do you yourself feel anything of what your ancestors would have felt in regard to this coincidence?’ He is trying to understand tapu and the meting out of consequences for its infringement.

The difficulties of colonization for Maori are also movingly explained by the Oxford-trained Te Pokiha, who has interrupted a promising academic career to train as a doctor. ‘I began to see the terrible inroads made by civilization in the health of my own people. Tuberculosis, syphilis, typhoid.’ But his comments on appropriation are even more revealing. ‘The pakeha give their children Maori Christian names because they sound pretty. They call their ships and their houses by Maori names…We have become a side-show in the tourist bureau—our dances—our art—everything.’ He is talking about Ngaio’s parents, who named her after the white-blossomed native ngaio tree, and about the frenetic Pakeha search for ‘signs’ of New Zealand identity plundered from Maori culture.

Ngaio may have used popular fiction to explore social issues, but she never lost sight of the need to entertain. Vintage Murder encourages people to think about bicultural issues, but it does not unravel stereotypes. There is something still of the noble savage in Te Pokiha, and an inappropriateness in Alleyn’s pompous thinking about him. In the dénouement, Te Pokiha almost comes to blows with the murderer. ‘His lips coarsened into a sort of snarl. He showed his teeth like a dog. “By Jove,” thought Alleyn, “the odd twenty percent of pure savage.”‘ With that racist thought, Alleyn confirms his outsider status.

Three months later, his New Zealand holiday nearly over, Alleyn is sitting on tussock looking across Lake Pukaki to Mount Aorangi, the cloud-piercer, and thinking of home. He has three letters in his pocket: one from Carolyn Dacres announcing her pregnancy—the greenstone he tiki ‘has fulfilled its purpose’; another from his assistant commissioner; and a final one from Inspector Fox, saying how glad they will be to see him back at the Yard again. Many of Alleyn’s New Zealand insights occur in the form of correspondence with Fox. His letters home to England are an important narrative thread, and his thoughts in them private and spontaneous. Ngaio’s letters to Nelly Rhodes were the same. After nearly five years in New Zealand, England seemed like a distant dream. Like Alleyn, she was ready to go back.

CHAPTER THREE Companions in Crime (#ulink_85ddd20e-a6be-57b2-8dbd-f6d484b52c6e)

‘It started off rather grandly with a printed invitation to Grosvenor House from the Detection Club,’ Ngaio explained later. They ate in a private dining room, with the Chief Constable of Surrey as guest speaker, but the meal was prelude to a more significant event: the 1937 induction of E.C. Bentley as president of the Detection Club. The cream of crime was there: Dorothy Sayers, John Rhode, Anthony Gilbert and Freeman Wills Croft, to name a few. After the speeches, they withdrew to a private drawing room where the real business began. Dorothy Sayers was mistress of ceremonies. Her imposing figure, ‘robust, round and rubicund’, towered over her colleagues. She struck Ngaio as something of ‘a cross between a guardsman & a female don with a jolly face (garnished with pince-nez), short grey curls, & a gruff voice’. Agatha Christie was not in attendance, but she would meet with Ngaio later that evening at the Detection Club rooms in Soho. In the meantime, Ngaio and her agent were seated in two chairs against an imposing rostrum. ‘I should explain before I go any further that my agent is a man with an ironic turn of mind…& a most singularly loud laugh.’ They were left alone in the room and suddenly the lights went out and there was blackness.

A door at the far end opened (as all doors in detective novels open) slowly. In came Miss Dorothy Sayers in her academic robes lit by a single taper. She mounted the rostrum. Judge my alarm when I saw that among the folds of her gown she secreted a large automatic revolver. She lit candles on her desk &…uttered some intimidating order. In came the others in a solemn procession bearing lighted tapers & lethal instruments. There was the warden of the blunt instrument—a frightful bludgeon, the warden of the sharp instrument—I think it was a dagger—the warden of the deadly phial, & last of all John Rhode with a grinning skull on a cushion. And there, in the middle of them, looking apprehensive, as well he might, was poor Mr Bentley.

With huge solemnity, Sayers administered the Detection Club oath to Bentley who promised:

under pain of every horror that every concoctor of crime fiction has ever invented to obey the laws of detective fiction. Never to conceal a clue. Never to leave a knotty point unravelled. To place before the reader every scrap of information that is relevant to the solution…He took the oath & then close to my ear & without the slightest hint of warning, in a private drawing room at Grosvenor House at about 11 p.m. on a summer evening Miss Dorothy Sayers loosed off her six-shooter. The others uttering primitive cries, waved their instruments, blunt sharp & venomous, & John Rhode, by means of some hidden device, caused his skull to be lit up from within. And to my undying shame my agent laughed like a hyena. The ceremony was practically over, which is perhaps the reason my agent escaped with his life.

Ngaio’s writing had earned her a place in the inner sanctum of British detective fiction. Since her début with A Man Lay Dead in 1934, she had written four titles, and when she arrived in London in the spring of 1937 it was with the manuscript for her sixth, Artists in Crime. She was sufficiently esteemed to be invited to a Detection Club dinner. If she had lived in London she would have been a member, but the club requirement that members attend five or six meetings a year prevented her from joining.

She would dine out on stories of her Detection Club evening when she returned to New Zealand, giving speeches, broadcasts and press interviews, but in the meantime she savoured this and other experiences. ‘I get a feeling coming back to London which I must confess I don’t get coming back to New Zealand…something quite extraordinary happens,’ she told a BBC interviewer. ‘I always wonder perhaps it won’t this time but it always does.’ That familiar sense of ecstasy had returned and, to top it off, she discovered she was a celebrity among the many fans of crime fiction in Britain. In 1945, Edmund Wilson would write scathingly in The New Yorker of the sad addicts of crime fiction whose ‘talk about “well-written” mysteries is simply an excuse for their vice, like the reasons that the alcoholic can always produce for a drink’. In 1937, this addiction was well established in Britain and the United States, and Ngaio Marsh was now a celebrated supplier of whodunits.

It was with some trepidation, therefore, that she contemplated a love interest for Alleyn. She had a winning formula with her monkish, bookish, aesthetic detective, and romance was a controversial issue among commentators. In 1928, S.S. Van Dine, writing under his real name of Willard Huntington Wright, had cautioned writers against involving their series detectives in romance. ‘There must be no love interest,’ he wrote in his list of ‘Twenty rules for writing detective stories’. ‘The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar.’ Perhaps as a consequence of this, when Dorothy Sayers introduced her sexually active Harriet Vane to Lord Peter Wimsey in Strong Poison in 1930, a critical outcry ensued. There was something not quite dependable about a detective who could be distracted from his crusade against crime by the sins of the flesh. Then there was reader distraction from the central problem of solving the murder, and the fact that detection was deemed a masculine pursuit. How could the puzzle be unravelled cleanly and fairly by a detective who was making romantic overtures to the opposite sex? Rationality must be ascendant in a genre with mind games at its core.

Ngaio’s agent was dubious about her marrying Alleyn off. But there was a dilemma. Nigel Bathgate was young and shallow, and as a confidant he had worn thin; and Inspector Fox was like a huge, comfortable, slightly shabby armchair—just part of the furniture. Ngaio knew a wife would expose aspects of her detective that the men in his life could not. Marriage seemed the next logical step in his emotional development.

On the voyage from New Zealand to England, Ngaio had mixed the ingredients of romance. Initially they had fizzed and popped and threatened to separate, like two incompatible substances in a beaker. At the beginning of Artists in Crime, Roderick Alleyn is on board the Niagara, making the same trip back to England as Ngaio. It could almost be Ngaio whom he sees on deck when he looks up, startled by a female voice.

‘Damn, damn, damn! Oh blast!‘…

Sitting on the canvas cover of one of the [life] boats was a woman. She seemed to be dabbing at something. She stood up and he saw that she wore a pair of exceedingly grubby flannel trousers, and a short grey overall. In her hand was a long brush. Her face was disfigured by a smudge of green paint, and her short hair stood up in a worried shock, as though she had run her hands through it. She was very thin and dark…A small canvas was propped up in the lid of an open paint-box. Alleyn drew in his breath sharply.

Her canvas is a simplified, magnificent rendering of the wharf they have just left at Suva. Alleyn finds the sketch almost too painful to behold. Its creator, who is less sacrosanct about it, stares dispassionately at the work with an unlit cigarette between her lips. A distracted search through her trouser pockets for a match reveals only an old paint-smeared handkerchief. She runs her fingers through her hair in frustration.

‘Blast!’ she repeated, and took the unlit cigarette from her lips.

‘Match?’ said Alleyn.

[And with that…] She started, lost her balance, and sat down abruptly.

Agatha Troy’s first encounter with her future husband is a bruising collision of egos. He is being his usual polite, slightly supercilious self, and she is being a professional painter with all the frustration and anxiety that this entails (and no one knew this better than her creator).

The view of the Suva wharf Troy is painting was a vision Ngaio had savoured on her return voyage to New Zealand on the Niagara in 1932. She treasured her impressions: the sultry day; the acid green of the banana leaves; the mop of dyed, ‘screaming magenta’ hair on the tall Fijian; and the brilliant sari of an Indian woman. She had wanted to paint them, but felt too inadequate. ‘It was this feeling of unfullfilment [sic] that led me to put another painter on another boat-deck,’ wrote Ngaio in her ‘Portrait of Troy’ for Dilys Winn’s Murderess Ink. ‘She made a much better job of it than I ever would have done.’

The naming of Troy seemed a more casual process than the naming of Alleyn. Ngaio wanted a plain, down-to-earth name, and thought of Agatha, and then the rather unusual surname of Troy. She signs her paintings ‘Troy’ and is known as Troy. Ngaio said there was no link between Agatha Troy and Agatha Christie.

Ngaio wove her whodunits out of the fabric of her own life. ‘I always tried to keep the settings of my books as far as possible within the confines of my own experience.’ For the make-up of her leading characters she looked to people she knew, and to herself.

If Alleyn reflected the almost fussily feminine, cultured, reserved side of Ngaio, then Troy was a projection of her truculently masculine, untamed artistic self. She was the painter in fiction that Ngaio longed to be in life. Ngaio could write about Troy’s genius and her cleverly spontaneous response to the visual world, but seldom achieved this same untrammelled brilliance in her own canvases. In her painting, as in her detective writing, Ngaio looked for the golden section—for the perfect measure of ordered form, for the formula that made sense of the world and what she did. She wrote tellingly of her days at art school in Christchurch: ‘I wanted to be told flatly whether things I had drawn were too big or too small, too busy or too empty. I wanted to know, when I failed completely, exactly where I had gone wrong and how I might have avoided doing so.’ Ngaio could never be the wild soul she created for Troy. She was too busy searching for the rules to realize her own vision. ‘It seems to me, now, that I never drew or painted in the way that was really my way: that somehow I failed to get on terms with myself.’

The parallels between Ngaio and her Pygmalion did not end there. They were uncannily alike in appearance. As the ship moved away, Agatha Troy ‘stood for a moment staring back at Fiji’.

Her hands gripped the shoulder-straps of her paint-box. The light breeze whipped back her short dark hair, revealing the contour of the skull and the delicate bones of the face. The temples were slightly hollow, the cheek-bones showed, the dark-blue eyes were deep-set under the thin ridge of the brows. The sun caught the olive skin with its smudge of green paint, and gave it warmth. There was a kind of spare gallantry about her.

Ngaio and Troy were alike in their ‘spare gallantry’, cherishing good manners and discretion with a kind of masculine valour. They were hugely protective of their careers. They were self-contained, yet also shy and socially reticent. They shared the same mannerisms: the same boyishness; the same worried tousling of the hair; the same ‘gruff stand-offish voice’; the same natural inclination to curl up their long legs and sit on the ground; the same addiction to smoking; the same long-fingered, tremulous hands…and the list could go on. Troy was made according to Ngaio’s pattern.

Even in love, their paths were similarly rocky. The painter in Troy cannot resist Alleyn’s good bones. She has to take his likeness. ‘The subject,’ she confesses in a letter to her artist friend Katti Bostock, in England, ‘is a detective and looks like a grandee. Sounds like it, too—very old-world and chivalrous and so on…I’m rather on the defensive about this Sleuth—I was so filthy rude to him, and he took it like a gent and made me feel like a bounder. Very awkward.’

Alleyn finds it equally difficult: ‘She bridles like a hedgehog…whenever I approach her’. And when she paints his portrait: ‘it’s a rum sensation when they get to the eyes; such a searching impersonal sort of glare they give you. She even comes close sometimes and peers into the pupils. Rather humiliating, it is. I try to return a stare every bit as impersonal, and find it tricky.’ It is Troy’s penetrating gaze that makes Alleyn self-reflective. In previous books he has openly regretted and loathed the more distasteful, invasive aspects of his job—the searching through ‘under-garment drawers for incriminating correspondence’, the opening up of private lives to public scrutiny.

He also abhors the carrying of guns and capital punishment. Fox says to him in Death in Ecstasy: ‘I know how you feel about homicide cases. I’d put it down to your imagination…I’m not at all fanciful, myself, but it does seem queer to me sometimes, how calm-like we get to work…and all the time there’s a trap and a rope and a broken neck at the end if we do our job properly.’

Alleyn is haunted by the consequences of a good result, but it is love, not death, that makes him really question his job. When they leave the ship at Southampton and find themselves tied up in the same murder case, with Troy as a suspect, Alleyn is full of qualms. He realizes she is appalled by the very aspects of his work that disturb him. Troy is running a small residential painting school at her home at Tatler’s End when, in full view of the class, the life model is dramatically impaled on a dagger, wedged through the back of the wooden throne. Only one of Troy’s pupils has pushed the model down onto the dagger, but everyone in the studio has a motive to kill her. The invasion of Troy’s privacy and that of her pupils, when Alleyn begins his investigation, makes Troy angry, and she challenges him:

‘Do you want to search our rooms for something? Is that it?’

‘Not for anything specific. I feel we should just—’ He stopped short. ‘I detest my job,’ he said; ‘for the first time I despise and detest it.’

And if this is not disquieting enough for Alleyn, Troy is also worried about losing her independence and identity as a painter. He can see how she shies away whenever she imagines herself becoming subsumed by his job and their relationship. Through Troy, Ngaio communicates a modern woman’s reluctance to sacrifice her career and her individuality to marriage; through Alleyn, she traces a modern man’s waking comprehension of this. Theirs will be a marriage of equality, but getting to the altar will be fraught.

Not many of Ngaio’s books are more biographically poignant than Artists in Crime. She knew the workings of the life room by heart. ‘I enjoyed best the nights when we made time studies from the nude,’ she wrote in Black Beech.

The model…was Miss Carter, a dictatorial but good-tempered girl who had come to us from show business…She was a big fair creature. If a twist of the torso or pelvis was asked of her she would grumble professionally and then grin. The gas heaters roared and the great lamp above the throne held the motionless figure in a pool of light. When the door was opened the students hurried in to manoeuvre for places. In a semi-circle round the throne sat people on ‘donkeys’ and behind them easels jockeyed for vantage points. ‘Have you see [sic] it from over there?’ Mr Wallwork would mutter, with a jerk of his head and one would hurriedly shift into the gap he indicated. The room looked like a drawing from Trilby: timeless, oddly dramatic, sweltering-hot and alive with concentration.

Richard Wallwork took life classes at Canterbury College in the best of a very academic and staid tradition. But his talented students, and his inspiration as a teacher, made up for many of the progressive ideas that were missing. One of his cleverest students was Olivia Spencer Bower, a young woman freshly back, in 1919, from art school in Britain. She began classes at the end of Ngaio’s time at Canterbury College. One day she remembered that ‘the model hadn’t turned up & Ngaio was doing the job’.