Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime

Mr Wallwork was pushing her around on the Throne mid gales of laughter. It was the personality which intrigues. Then one day I met her outside a painting shop in Colombo Street. She had on an enormous camel hair coat with high collar & great wide shoulders. I came home in rather shocked surprise & said to my mother—do you know she’s beautiful.

Ngaio sat for her artist friends formally and informally. She knew what it was like to be manhandled by someone setting a pose. She could imagine the consequences of a dagger jammed through the back of the bench.

The tempestuous courtship of Alleyn and Troy continues unresolved through Artists in Crime, paralleling the police investigation, and just when the momentum of both is about to founder there is another murder, more hideous and haunting than any before. In Golden Age detective fiction, the horror of decay was usually mitigated by the narrow timeframe, and by makeshift shrouds and the sterile formality of mortuary vans, autopsy tables and coroner’s inquests. But this body, that of free-living artist Garcia, waits days to be discovered, in a dusty garret-like studio in a semi-derelict warehouse in the East End of London. You can almost smell his putrefying corpse in the words she uses. Troy has warned Garcia about his lifestyle. ‘While you’re here you’ve got to behave yourself. You know what I mean?…I won’t have any bogus Bohemianism, or free love, or mere promiscuity at Tatler’s End. It shocks the servants, and it’s messy. All right?’ But Garcia cannot contain himself, and pays for his drug addiction and womanizing with his life.

Troy takes an orthodox stand on an issue Ngaio knew plenty about. Art studio life in Christchurch was bohemian. A sense of sexual freedom and fluidity reigned, and this was the milieu she sought out before and after her trip to England. But this repressed provincial bohemianism had to be circumspect to survive. Through the bedrock of Christchurch ran seams of liberalism, sexual licence, homosexuality and just plain eccentricity, which were known about but not usually discussed. Troy does not judge Garcia’s behaviour; she merely tells him to keep it out of sight.

Artists in Crime was Ngaio’s last title published with Geoffrey Bles. Her agent Edmund Cork negotiated a more favourable contract with Collins, who was also Agatha Christie’s publisher. She left the company that launched her career with reluctance, but the advantages were undeniable. For the next four titles, she would receive an advance of £250 and 15 per cent royalties. From 1940 her American publisher would be Boston-based Little, Brown. In the meantime, Collins was wonderfully convenient because she was there in England to confirm arrangements and sign papers. Over the years, Ngaio established a close friendship with publishing magnate William (Billy) Collins, who in many ways resembled her dapper, well-mannered, well-meaning detective. Things were good for Ngaio. She was in a more lucrative stable with the promise of financial security, and England was an exciting place to be.

She began writing for New Zealand syndicated newspapers under the pen name ‘The Canterbury Pilgrim Again’. Her exhilaration was clear in descriptions of her arrival in spring, which had more significance than New Zealand’s. ‘Here the trees are so long asleep, the fields hard with frost or sodden with the cold winter rains.’ The English countryside was awakening, and she was thrilled to see ‘the pricking of young buds’, the soft blades of new grass like ‘fine hair on the firm margins of hills’, and yellow flowers in cottage gardens and cowslips in the hedgerows.

Her excitement was also there in descriptions of events leading up to the coronation of King George VI in May 1937. ‘On the road outside Camberley we passed troops on their way up to London,’ she told readers. ‘When at last the roads turned finally into streets and scarlet buses joined the thickening stream of traffic, we saw banners hung out from all the windows.’ London was alive with festive buzz and ‘Hyde Park…turned into an enormous camp, with horse lines, tank lines, and rows and rows and rows of army tents’. Hazardous scaffolding was erected to clean huge civic monuments. ‘All that strange bronze and marble population of London will be smartened for the Coronation,’ she wrote. ‘Only the rabbits and mice round Peter Pan’s pedestal in Kensington Gardens have no need of spring cleaning, for they are polished…by small fat hands in woolly gloves…London, like a grand old dowager, puts on her royal colours with an air and prepares to welcome a king.’ Set against this canvas of pomp and ceremony was her private pleasure at meeting the Rhodes family again. It was not long before their lives became enmeshed in the delights of London’s debutante season.

Nelly Rhodes’s daughter Maureen was presented, and Ngaio was invited to ‘coming out’ events that included a Royal Garden Party in June. These occasions provided fascinating slices of upper-class and aristocratic society. She sat with her friend in the chaperones’ corner, a ‘looker-on’, and what she saw became material for another book. ‘For NELLY to whom this book owes its existence,’ she wrote in the dedication to Death in a White Tie, one of her most superbly crafted classic English whodunits. The flurry of debutante parties was a perfect setting for blackmail and high-society murder. Greed mixed with jealousy and aristocratic indulgence could conceivably transform the rituals of the mating game into the rituals of a murder game. And in London it could plausibly involve a small, overbred group. With Nelly, Ngaio heard the snatches of society gossip and learned the debutante rules, which were strict and established, but the idea for the murder had another source.

‘The facts of the case are simply these,’ wrote Fergus Hume in the opening chapter of The Mystery of a Hansom Cab. ‘On the twenty-seventh day of July, at the hour of twenty minutes to two o’ clock in the morning, a hansom cab drove up to the police station, in Grey Street, St Kilda, and the driver made the startling statement that his cab contained the body of a man whom he had reason to believe had been murdered.’ The murderer wore an overcoat over his evening dress and a large soft felt hat that concealed his face. These clothes were identical to those of the victim. At the coroner’s inquest, an expert witness confirmed that the victim had died from the inhalation of chloroform from a handkerchief held over his mouth. The victim’s heart was flaccid with a ‘tendency to fatty degeneration’, and that accelerated the fatal result.

It was a brilliant concept—a hansom cab was so public and yet so private. Hume understood that it was the perfect place for a murder because the crime could be concealed from the driver seated outside, who was the only witness. Ngaio realized that a horseless cab driven in London in 1937 could be equally secluded. Lord Robert Gospell, known to his friends as Bunchy, is doing undercover work for Roderick Alleyn. Bunchy, an effete, aging, aristocratic party animal who minces his way unremarkably through London’s upper echelons, has worked for Scotland Yard before. He is an ideal plant to bust a blackmail ring, and a personal friend of Alleyn’s, so when he is discovered dead in a London taxi it gives the detective a terrible jolt.

Ring, ring, ring goes the telephone. He wakes up with a start. It is four o’clock in the morning and Alleyn has nodded off in his room at the Yard. He picks up the receiver and a disembodied voice says: ‘There’s a case come in, sir. I thought I’d better report to you at once. Taxi with a fare. Says the fare’s been murdered and has driven straight here with the body.’ Alleyn goes downstairs, thinking all the time of Bunchy and his blackmail ring. He cannot understand it: Bunchy was supposed to telephone and report in. Alleyn is greeted at the entrance by the uniformed sergeant on duty. ‘Funny sort of business, Mr Alleyn…The cabby insists it was murder and won’t say a word till he sees you.’ Alleyn opens the door of the cab, turns on the dim roof light, and there is Bunchy, dead.

Alleyn reels in shock. When he recovers a little, he asks the cabby why he is so sure it was murder.

‘Gorblimy, governor,’ said the driver, ‘ain’t I seen wiv me own eyes ‘ow the ovver bloke gets in wiv ‘im, and ain’t I seen wiv me own eyes ‘ow the ovver bloke gets out at ‘is lordship’s ‘ouse dressed up in ‘is lordship’s cloak and ‘at and squeaks at me in a rum little voice same as ‘is lordship.’

Bunchy has been asphyxiated with his cloak, and a consultation with Bunchy’s doctor, Sir Daniel Davidson, confirms that Bunchy was ill: a healthy man might die in about four minutes, a man with a heart condition could take less than two, and Bunchy possibly died almost immediately.

The parallels between Ngaio’s and Hume’s murders are obvious, but beyond the basic framework of the killings, the stories develop differently. Hume’s novel predated Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock mystery by a year, and Simon Caterson, in his introduction to The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, argues that they spearheaded two very different directions in crime fiction. ‘Where Conan Doyle concentrates on the establishing of the character of his protagonist, Hume’s detectives Gorby and Kilsip are merely two players within an ensemble of actors.’ Hume used his mystery to explore the world in which his characters lived rather than developing any one of them into a super-sleuth.

The Queens of Golden Age crime wrote in the Conan Doyle tradition, but in Death in a White Tie Ngaio broke away from the conventional model. This mystery was much more a commentary on human behaviour and social mores. It had a super-sleuth at its centre, but also a flavour of what Hume achieved with his anatomizing vision of society. Ngaio’s criticism of the rhetorical aspects of the class system and her latent cynicism about the debutante process pushed boundaries. One of the most frequently made, and perhaps most valid, criticisms of Golden Age crime fiction was its class-consciousness and cultural bias. There can be no denying the fact that Death in a White Tie was a highly Anglo-centric detective novel, but it was also critical of the hierarchies that support class difference. Ngaio’s attitude to snobbery was clear—she disliked it. Her least appealing characters are the most pretentious. General Halcut-Hackett is classic regiment. To meet him, Alleyn ‘walked through a hall which, though it had no tongue, yet it did speak of the most expensive and most fashionable house decorator in London’. Halcut-Hackett’s study is permeated by the smell of leather and cigars; his face is ‘terra-cotta, his moustache formidable, his eyes china blue. He was the original ramrod brass-hat, the subject of all army jokes kindly or malicious. It was impossible to believe his mind was as blank as his face would seem to confess.’ But of course it is.