Читать книгу Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime - Joanne Drayton - Страница 7

It was August 1932, the chill end of a stark Christchurch winter, when Ngaio returned. Her parents’ bedroom at Marton Cottage was a hushed sickroom. There were silences and huddled out-of-sight consultations. Death could be only briefly contained, but to Ngaio, sitting by the bed watching, Rose Marsh’s end was as ‘cruelly and as excruciatingly protracted as if it had been designed by Torquemada’, the most cold-blooded of the Dominican inquisitors. Rose’s pain was managed so that they could whisper their parting words. The change in the woman Ngaio and Henry loved was terrible to see. She had been the family’s mainstay; elegant, effervescent, always the driving force. As a child, Ngaio had watched in awe, believing her mother to be the most beautiful, talented woman alive. Rose had that special mixture of qualities that accelerated a child’s imagination: she was both literary and theatrical, so life in her small family became a pantomime of castles and strange imaginary creatures.

Rose came from a family of conjurors, so it was only natural that she would add the magic. Her mother, born Esther Coster, taught her how to work hard, how to economize, and how to be a good wife; but it was her father, Edward Seager, who taught her how to perform, brilliantly. He was an Englishman who had arrived at the tiny settlement of Port Lyttelton in 1851. Behind the fragile makeshift buildings of Lyttelton loomed the natural amphitheatre of the Port Hills, and close behind them was the settlement of Christchurch on the flat Canterbury Plains, stretching 40 miles (65 kilometres) across to the blue mountainous margins of the Southern Alps in the west. In England, Edward had been a poor schoolteacher, but he did not pursue this job in the colonies. At 24 years of age he became a sergeant, virtually in charge of the district police force. He designed a new police uniform, and within three years had tracked down and arrested James McKenzie, the notorious sheep rustler.

His job meant that Seager was in charge of both the prison and the asylum, because the colony made no distinction between the mad and the bad. At the time of his arrival, the Lyttelton prison housed 11 inmates in a room 14 feet (4.3 metres) square. Blankets crawled with lice. ‘The roof leaked. There was no proper sanitation, no books, no indulgences, a diet that was not a diet, and hardly any furniture.’ Seager lobbied for better conditions, and when in 1863-64, Sunnyside Hospital was finally built a few miles out of Christchurch, he moved there to become superintendent, and his wife, the matron. His treatments were both progressive and unorthodox. He improved diet, hygiene, and access to fresh air and exercise, but it was his commitment to cultural and mental stimulation that was almost unheard of. He called the patients his ‘children’; he built a stage; he had a piano and organ installed; he gave magic lantern shows; circuses came; plays were performed; madness and fantasy mixed in a way that was medicinal.

His great love was conjuring. One of his favourite tricks was an act of levitation, where an appropriately sized daughter was ‘crammed into a torturous under-suit of paper-thin jointed steel’. She would sit on stage reading a book with her chin propped pensively on her hand. Edward Seager waved his wand and turned ‘a secret key in his daughter’s back. The armour locked.’ And, as Ngaio later recalled, ‘Puck-like, Gramp snatched the stool from under her and there she was: suspended.’ For encores, he would saw his daughters in half, or make them disappear in a magic cabinet. ‘The patients adored it.’ He was also something of a mesmerizer-cum-faith-healer: ‘he would flutter his delicate hands across and across’ the foreheads of difficult patients, and family and friends, until their headaches disappeared.

Rose emerged from her eccentric childhood as a quite ‘extraordinarily talented’ actress. She lived the parts she played and brought the characters alive in a way that was spellbinding. At just 19, she was chosen to play Lady Macbeth for a visiting company led by American Shakespearian actor-director George Milne. He wanted her to travel with the company, but she refused. When the English actor Charles Warner visited New Zealand, he offered to take her to England and launch her career. Again she declined, travelling with him and his wife only as far as Australia to get a flavour of the professional actor’s life.

Rose found the makeshift bohemian existence of the travelling theatre unpalatable. The life was too untidy; the change, the uncertainties, the stress of opening to unknown audiences in unfamiliar centres too much for her. She returned to Christchurch, resumed her amateur acting activities, and on the stage met future husband, Henry Marsh. He was a tall, good-looking man like her father, theatrical and imaginative, with a dry wit and an idiosyncratic way of looking at the world that was unexpectedly funny. He wooed her with his humour and his make-believe. The chemistry between them on and off the stage was magnetic. They married in 1894, when Henry was 31 years old and Rose a year younger.

Ngaio described Gramp Seager and her father, Henry, as ‘have-nots’. Christchurch was a cruel place in which to be a ‘have-not’. The colonial vision for New Zealand was an egalitarian England reconstructed in an Antipodean Eden. It was to be a clean start: a post-industrial culture in a pre-industrial country. Community would stratify and flourish naturally without the artificial strictures or social evils of the Old World. In reality, class consciousness and social evils were packed in trunks along with the ballgowns, white ties and tailcoats.

In Canterbury, the founding charter was less egalitarian. The Canterbury Association Society, established to colonize the province, planned to transplant a perfectly variegated specimen of English society, complete with aristocracy and middle and lower classes. A good deal of the land surrounding Christchurch was sold off in huge farming blocks to wealthy English families who became the social élite. The city itself, laid out on a grid pattern with civic parks and gardens and, later, an elegant Gothic Anglican cathedral at its heart, was to be the service centre of the rich farmland that developed.

Christchurch’s social stratification began with the first four Canterbury Association ships that landed in Lyttelton Harbour in December 1850. The well-heeled immigrants on board became the city’s founding fathers, bequeathing to their descendants membership of an elect group. Since both sides of Ngaio’s family had missed these social boats, there was only property ownership to distinguish them, and, as much as he was admired (and even romanticized), Gramp Seager was only a public servant and Ngaio’s father a simple bank clerk. Thus, in Christchurch they were ‘have-nots’.

Rose and Henry Marsh rented a small house in Fendalton—the best area they could afford—and kept a maid, which was almost beyond their means. Gramp Seager was a dreamer and a spendthrift, but still an ambitious man; Henry Marsh lived in a world of his own. From early days, Rose realized he would make a better father than provider. Their daughter, Edith Ngaio Marsh, was born on 23 April 1895. Henry’s belated attempt four years later to register her birth created an official error, that Ngaio later used to claim she was born in 1899. (And this mistake was perpetuated in print many times.)

It was a perfect marriage of opposites. Henry’s soft-centred fantasy combined with Rose’s galvanized theatricality to create an imaginative wonderland for Ngaio that she never completely escaped. She was the centre of their world, and their world was a stage where life and drama mixed so seamlessly that the anxious, sometimes highly strung young Ngaio could not distinguish the difference. She was disconcerted when she saw her parents rehearsing a new script: suddenly they became strangers. In The Fool’s Paradise, her mother was transformed into a wicked femme fatale who slowly poisoned her husband. The tension of the scenes was overpowering for the terrified child. Her horror of poison lingered, and was reignited when Rose Marsh took her to a production of Romeo and Juliet. The fighting scenes were incomprehensible. She buried her head in her mother’s lap. ‘They aren’t really fighting, are they?’ she asked desperately. ‘Yes, yes!’ cried Rose, consumed by the action on stage. And to add to the awfulness, ‘there was Poison and a young girl Taking It!’ This confirmed Ngaio’s lifelong phobia about poisons.

But Rose’s judgement was usually sound. She took Ngaio and her young friend Ned Bristed to children’s plays like Sweet Nell of Old Drury and Bluebell in Fairyland, and when the vast International Exhibition opened in Christchurch in 1906, Rose took her daughter numerous times to see displays of paintings, go to concerts, watch the dazzling nightly fireworks, and take wild sideshow rides. She introduced Ngaio to literature that braced her mind and imagination. Between the ages of 11 and 14 Ngaio read David Copperfield, Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend. She was read to, and read herself, a kaleidoscope of different titles that included anything from Peter Pan to Roderick Random and Tom Jones, which her father recommended she read to find out about ‘fast’ girls.

Sexual looseness was tolerated by neither of her parents; nor did they accept breaches of etiquette or sloppy diction. Their uncompromising Victorian standards were rigorously policed, especially by her mother. It was a hothouse childhood Rose wanted for her daughter, and she was prepared to sacrifice having another baby to provide it.

Ngaio’s first taste of the real world was a tiny, 20-student dame school run by Miss Sibella E. Ross for children between the ages of six and 10. Fitting in was an ordeal for Ngaio, who was the tallest in her class and had an astonishingly deep voice. Rose Marsh was anxious, but she realized that her only child must integrate. Ngaio made firm friends with two bristling boys in the class, and the bullying ceased.

Rose and Henry Marsh were in their early 40s by the time they had finally saved enough money to build their own home. They bought a steep section on the Cashmere Hills close to Christchurch, and employed Rose’s architect cousin, Samuel Hurst Seager, to design a four-roomed bungalow with a large verandah, which they called Marton Cottage. A horse-drawn wagon was loaded with their belongings, and they journeyed from Fendalton to the Cashmere Hills, camping in bell-tents near the site for three months. They were so eager, they moved in before it was completed. ‘From the beginning we loved our house,’ wrote Ngaio. ‘It was the fourth member of our family.’ At last they were homeowners in a town that made property a criterion of status.

Marton Cottage was a brilliant piece of Marsh family foresight. At the time they bought the section, the Cashmere Hills were a blank canvas of heathery tussock, low bush, and the occasional stand of trees with an isolated homestead. As Christchurch grew, Cashmere became one of its most desirable suburbs. On a clear day, the view from the cottage across the city to the distant Southern Alps was breathtaking. But in the opening decade of the 20th century the city had not yet begun lapping at the edges of the honey-coloured hills, and the trip into town to Miss Ross’s school involved a long walk and then a protracted tram ride. Rose took Ngaio each day. On the way home, they always got off a stop early and walked to save paying for another section.

When Ngaio became too old for the dame school, her mother struggled with lessons at home for a while before deciding to employ a governess, Miss Ffitch. Ngaio was more of a challenge now. The outdoor life of the Cashmere Hills had instigated a Huckleberry Finn phase. Her constant companions were boys: Vernon, who lived locally, and her cousin Harvey, and later there was Ned Bristed. They made rafts and sailed them up the Heathcote River, they lit campfires, played primal games of hunt and chase across the tussock, and ran wild.

Henry Marsh did not exactly stem the tide. He secured Ngaio a succession of ponies, which were being broken in, so she could ride bareback along the beach. When she was still a young girl, he gave her a Frankfurt single-bore rifle. ‘How superb were those sunny mornings when I was allowed to walk behind my father and Tip [the family dog] through the plantation where he and his friends went quail-shooting. On these occasions he was completely and explicitly himself.’ It was Henry in his mellow easy moments with whom Ngaio identified; but it was Ned who taught her how to smoke:

We bought a tin of ten ‘Three Castles Yellow (strong)’ divided them equally, retired into a wigwam we had built among some gorse-bushes, and chain-smoked the lot without evil results. Encouraged by this success, we carved ourselves pipes from willow wood into which we introduced bamboo stems and in which we smoked tea. We also smoked red-hot cigars made of pine needles and newspaper.

For a time Ngaio was out of control. ‘I had become a formidable,’ she later admitted, ‘in some ways an abominable, child.’ It was little wonder that Miss Ffitch chose to ignore the sight, from a bedroom window, of Ngaio under the trees with her head wreathed in pipe smoke. ‘I encountered her gaze: transfixed, blank, appalled, incredulous. For a second or two we stared at each other and then her face withdrew into the shadows.’ In addition to formal lessons, Miss Ffitch had the unfortunate job of dragging her reluctant charge twice a week to piano lessons with ‘Miss Jennie Black, Mus. Bac.’, a title Ngaio delighted in chanting ‘because of its snappy rhythm’. According to Ngaio herself, she ‘had a poor ear, little application and fluctuating interest’, but at other marriage-worthy accomplishments she was even worse: ‘I had and have, rather less aptitude than a bricklayer for sewing’. She was beginning to show real promise at art, but it was the shining light of Miss Ffitch’s Shakespeare that first penetrated the smoky haze of Ngaio’s adolescence. She began with King Lear. Despite the fact that it was a censored version with every possible sexual reference or innuendo removed (’just torture, murder and madness left’), and even though Miss Ffitch delivered it primly without ‘a word of exposition’ other than the notes (which she overused), Ngaio ‘lapped it up’. She could understand it. She loved the poetry of its language.

It was probably with a sense of relief that Rose Marsh watched as ‘Miss Ffitch said goodbye and bicycled down the lane for the last time’: Ngaio was going to school. It would cost them a fortune for fees and the expensive uniform, but Rose felt certain that it would be worthwhile. Ngaio needed taming.

It was 1910, and St Margaret’s College had just opened and was run by a strict order of Anglo-Catholic nuns. Only the best families could afford to send their daughters there. Rose would have to scrimp and save even more, but the school had the values and status she wanted. It was not that she was an avid Christian, or even a great snob; what impressed her most was the school’s serious attitude towards young women’s education. The curriculum was heavy in literature, history and the arts, but what they taught promised to be equal to that of any good boys’ school. She knew Ngaio had potential and believed that Ngaio could realize it there. She was right. ‘From the first day, I loved St. Margaret’s.’

Ngaio swapped Huck Finn for High Anglicanism. ‘To say that I took to Divinity as a duck to water is a gross understatement. I took to it with a sort of spiritual whoop and went in…boots and all.’ St Michael and All Angels was the school’s parish church. She adored its theatre: the sermons denouncing sin and promising retribution; the processions; the banners; the dressing-up—the stoles, the copes and the cassocks; and the ‘drift of incense’ mingled with the smell of waxed wood and coir matting. The vicar’s children, the ‘Burton sisters’, became special friends. They were English and loved acting and the theatre. The other close friend was Sylvia Fox.

Then there was the drama of her English classes. ‘Eng. Lit. with Miss Hughes was exacting, and absorbing, an immensely rewarding adventure…she gave me a present that I value more than any other: an abiding passion for the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare.’ But Ngaio felt guilty about Miss Hughes. After winning a Navy League Empire Prize ‘with an essay containing thirty-one spelling mistakes’, she got the distinct impression that her teacher was not amused and would have liked to have read this, and other things her pupil wrote. Ngaio’s diffidence about her work made it hard for her to ask for assistance. She was very independent, but also painfully shy at times.

However, Ngaio’s interest in literature, creative writing, drama and art was fostered, so she distinguished herself, becoming head prefect in her senior year. This brought her into regular contact with her ‘schoolgirl crush’, the headmistress, Sister Winifred. They began swapping confidences, Ngaio trying awkwardly one day to express her wish to do something for the Church. ‘To my amazement,’ Ngaio recalled,

she opened wide her arms and, with a delighted smile exclaimed, ‘You are coming to us!’

Nothing could have been farther from my thoughts. Never in my most exalted moments had I imagined myself to have a vocation for the Sisterhood. Immersed in the folds of her habit, I was appalled and utterly at a loss. It was impossible to extricate myself…I listened aghast to her expressions of joy and left in a state of utmost confusion. It was an appalling predicament.

But Ngaio did find a calling at St Margaret’s. In fact, she found two: art and the theatre. While still at high school, she studied part-time at the Canterbury College School of Art, taking classes two afternoons a week in the antique room from 1909 to 1914. The results were encouraging. She believed art would become her occupation, and the theatre her leisure. In her lunchtimes, twice a week she went to the lower school at St Margaret’s to entertain the small girls by writing stories and enacting them. This evolved into the play Bundles, which was deemed good enough by Sister Winifred (who harboured no hard feelings) to be performed at the end-of-year prizegiving.

Encouraged, Ngaio wrote a full-length play called The Moon Princess, based on a fairy story by George Macdonald. ‘I showed it to my friends, the Burtons and they bravely decided to produce it on quite an imposing scale at St. Michael’s.’ Her mother agreed to take a leading role, as the witch. Rose played her heart out. She screeched the ‘dark nights’ curse so frighteningly that the neck of every small child in the house crawled with fear. Her big scene was with Helen Burton, who was director as well as star of the show. They gave it ‘everything they had’, transforming Ngaio’s dialogue. Gramp Seager was there, too, and after the final performance he presented Ngaio with two precious heirlooms. One was a book called Actors of the Century, with his own emphatic annotations in the margins; the other was the ‘tawny-coloured lush-velvet coat’ of renowned actor Edmund Kean. This was his highest accolade.

Rose Marsh was a very proud woman that night. There were social engagements in Christchurch she could not attend because of the state of her clothes. She recycled her dresses, coats, hats and shoes so that her daughter could stay at school. Now, her sacrifice was vindicated. Ngaio was a work in progress. Through her, Rose could relive her own life and overcome the fear that had halted her development. There was much at stake.

Ngaio believed that her mother ‘over-concentrated’ on her. ‘Is there such a thing as a daughter Fixation?’ she asked in Black Beech. ‘If so, I suppose it could be argued that my beloved mother was afflicted with it.’ But how else could Rose realize her ambition?

After school finished, Ngaio’s life became harder for Rose to control. When Ngaio met the Rhodes family in 1924, it was almost impossible. There were weekend parties at Meadowbank. ‘In perpetuity’ wrote Ngaio flippantly in their visitors’ book after one of her stays. Her parents went to Meadowbank, too, and enjoyed it, but found the life of indolent luxury there something of an enigma. In England the Rhodeses were very kind to Ngaio, but Rose felt they had led her daughter astray. Her illness had brought Ngaio home.

Whatever I may write about my mother will be full of contradictions. I think that as I grew older I grew, better perhaps than anyone else, to understand her. And yet how much there was about her that still remains unaccounted for, like odd pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Of one thing I am sure: she had in her an element of creative art never fully realised. I think the intensity of devotion which might have been spent upon its development was poured out upon her only child.

Rose Marsh died of liver cancer on 23 November 1932. She was 68 years old.

Three months after Ngaio’s return to New Zealand, ‘on a warm evening, my father and I faced each other across my old schoolroom table and divided between us the letters of sympathy that we must answer’. It would be a different future without Rose. Paradoxically, in spite of all that she had done to realize her daughter, it was in Rose Marsh’s absence that Ngaio became herself. ‘Most of us,’ she wrote reflectively in Black Beech, ‘could point to a time, often long after physical maturity has been reached, and say to ourselves: “it was then that I…grew up.” My mother’s illness…marked I think my own coming-of-age.’ The Marsh household became orientated towards masculine things. Ngaio and her father bached together in a comfortable but less colourful life.

Then one day a note arrived from her literary agent Edmund Cork to say that he had placed her book with publisher Geoffrey Bles and that it would be released in 1934. It seemed nothing short of miraculous. Ngaio had hoped, but had hardly had time to give the book’s progress a second thought. Geoffrey Bles offered her £30 in advance and a 10 per cent royalty. She worked on the proofs long-distance. When the book arrived, two months after it was on the shelves in England, Henry read it captivated, as Rose had, ‘with his hand shaking and the pipe jiggling between his teeth when he came to the exciting parts’. The dedication was:

ForMy FatherAnd in memory ofMy Mother.

Nineteen thirty-four was a big year for the Queens of Crime.

Agatha Christie released her chilling Murder on the Orient Express with another remarkable dénouement that left readers rushing for the rulebook. Surely, it was not cricket to have everyone involved? After writing 29 novels, plays and collections of poems, Christie was reaching her zenith.

Then there was Dorothy Sayers, who was realizing her aim of integrating detective fiction with the novel of manners. In her eighth novel, Murder Must Advertise, published in 1933, she found her stride and so did Lord Peter Wimsey. He was less affected, and so was she. Sayers was writing about her own experiences working in an advertising agency. Her familiarity with the people and the settings gave the story conviction, making it her most successful and well integrated so far. The Nine Tailors, published in 1934, continued this process, providing readers with perceptive observations of church life and bellringing. By enriching the crime novel, Sayers expanded its market. Her interventions did not change the style or form, but they did rehabilitate it for a more sophisticated audience, ultimately broadening its readership.

The publication of Margery Allingham’s Death of a Ghost, also in 1934, was another watershed. This was her first truly accomplished piece of crime writing. With her talent now tempered by the experience of writing six Campion novels, Allingham combined the dramatic tension of earlier books with more convincing characterization and plot to create a captivating story.

The Queens were in their prime when Ngaio began publishing, and their writing helped generate a huge interest in the genre. During the inter-war period—marked by the end of one catastrophic conflict and the anticipation of another—there was a seemingly spontaneous desire among readers to assuage fear of universal death by focusing on the particular. The demand for detective fiction burgeoned. But it was a difficult field to break into, and its exponents were well practised. Considering the context of its launch, Ngaio’s A Man Lay Dead did remarkably well. Critics who had watched Christie, Sayers and Allingham develop seemed prepared to let Ngaio do the same, although there was confusion over the writer’s race and gender. The Times Literary Supplement critic took a stab. ‘Mr. Marsh’s manipulation of motive and alibi is neat and effective and repays careful attention’, but ‘His methods of detection…[are] somewhat distracting’, and Chief Detective Inspector Alleyn, a ‘most superior person, expensively educated and a connoisseur of good living [is] rather tiresomely familiar’. This kind of criticism inspired Ngaio to develop her own individual approach.

She was working on a script that represented a new departure. Enter a Murderer drew on her knowledge of the theatre, ‘trying to get the smell and feel of backstage’. The Rat and Beaver at the Unicorn is a play-within-a-novel, which echoes rather than explains the action. Roderick Alleyn is in the audience at the Unicorn Theatre, as a guest of Nigel Bathgate. The tension is palpable in the final fatal scene of The Rat and Beaver. Anger boils between cartel bosses the Beaver, played by Surbonadier, and the Rat, played by Felix Gardener. The intensity of their venom has brought the audience to the edge of their seats. Bathgate feels extremely uncomfortable because he knows the fury between the men is more than just acting: off stage they hate each other. Inspector Alleyn’s eyes are riveted to the action. Nigel can see the tension in his face. The anxiety is almost unbearable.

This is the moment of truth when the infamous Rat is exposed as an illicit drug trafficker, traitor, Nazi spy, or hero of the British Secret Service. The Beaver’s masterminding of the opium trade is well known. On stage he takes a revolver from his pocket and loads it, then addresses Gardener, the man who, in real life, has stolen his starring role and his lover.

‘So the Rat’s in his hole at last!‘

‘Beaver,‘ whispered Felix Gardener…‘You’re not a killer, Rat,’ he said. ‘I am.‘

Gardener raises his hands above his head, but then in the doorway stands Stephanie Vaughan holding a revolver pointed at Surbonadier. The Beaver has been outmanoeuvred by his cheating stage girlfriend (and real-life ex-lover). He drops his hand. The gun hangs limp in his fingers. Sneeringly, Gardener thanks Stephanie as he takes the revolver from Surbonadier. She taunts him. Suddenly Surbonadier snaps, grabs at Gardener’s neck, and pushes his head back. Gardener’s hand jerks. Bang goes the gun across the blackness. The sound is deafening. ‘Surbonadier crumpled up and, turning a face that was blank of every expression but that of profound astonishment, fell in a heap at Gardener’s feet.’ Alleyn seems to know what has happened, even before the shocked usher finds him, seated on the aisle. He urges Nigel to get out as quickly as possible.

Someone has exchanged real bullets for fakes, breaching the boundary between illusion and reality. In the make-believe of the play, the Rat shoots the Beaver. In real life, Arthur Surbonadier is dead on the stage floor. There is no doubt that Gardener has killed Surbonadier, but did he murder him? It is in the slippage between illusion and reality that the ambiguity of the crime exists. The act of murder presupposes intent: the act of acting assumes pretence and therefore innocence. Is Gardener innocent or guilty? The answer is in his face when Chief Detective Inspector Alleyn tricks him into climbing up a ladder backstage beyond the ceiling cloth and into believing that a large sack hanging from a rope in the ceiling is the body of his second victim, Props.

‘Alleyn!’ he cried in a terrible voice, ‘Alleyn!’

‘What’s the matter?’ shouted Alleyn.

‘He’s here—he’s hanged himself—he’s here.’

‘Who?’

‘Props—it’s Props.’

His horrified face looked down at them.

‘It’s Props!’ he repeated…

‘Come down,’ said Alleyn.

Gardener comes down, and within six rungs of the stage he turns and sees the men who are awaiting him. With an incoherent cry he stops short. His lips are drawn back, showing his gums. A streak of saliva trickles down his chin. He squints. ‘And how do you know it is Props?’ asks Alleyn. In that instant, the actor is unmasked to reveal the murderer, and his animal-like snarl is confirmation. Felix Gardener is the face of deviance exposed. In Ngaio’s closed world, he represents a temporary aberration in the fabric of normality. As in most Golden Age detective fiction, his psychology, his pathology, his reason for being what he is, is of less interest than the process of his identification and removal. The genre’s focus is the restoration of order, and in the anxious decades of inter-war uncertainty this was immensely appealing.

The theatre provided Ngaio with the perfect place to stage a murder. It was a hermetic, hierarchical world where schedules and patterns of behaviour could be scrutinized and checked, and it was filled with sinister potential. Behind the stage was a labyrinth of backdrops, props and passageways; in front, when the lights went down, was a sea of blackness. Then there were the actors, their emotions heightened by the tensions of putting on a show and playing their parts. Among spectators, too, there was the buzz of excited expectation, and a tempting echo of crime novel readers, who were a parallel audience. It was an ideal backdrop against which to tease out issues. Ngaio was still intrigued by Pirandello’s Six Characters, with its metaphysical exploration of illusion and reality: ‘If you long above everything to be a director, this is the play that nags and clamours to be done.’ She was not yet directing actors, but she could direct characters. What interested her was the melodramatic way actors play themselves in real life.

‘Darling,’ [Stephanie Vaughan] said, taking her time over lighting a cigarette and quite unconsciously adopting the best of her six by-the-mantelpiece poses. ‘Darling, I’m so terribly, terribly upset by all this. I feel I’m to blame. I am to blame.’

Surbonadier was silent. Miss Vaughan changed her pose. He knew quite well, through long experience, what her next pose would be, and equally well that it would charm him as though he were watching her for the first time. Her voice would drop. She would purr. She did purr.

Enter a Murderer had more dramatic pace and change of scene than A Man Lay Dead, and the dialogue was more compelling and implicit in moving action along. The characters were convincing and in sharper relief. The theatre was not just a venue for crime, it was the book’s defining energy, creating a cohesive, vivid piece of writing.

Ngaio would write sunk in an armchair, mostly at night, with a favourite fountain pen filled with green ink in an exercise book or on loose-leaf foolscap paper in a hard cover resting on her knee. Only when the house lights went down did the characters come onto the stage of her imagination. The scenes would run through her mind almost complete, as if she were watching them. After she had written 1,000 words or so, the curtains were drawn and she would go to bed. She was disciplined and methodical, writing fluently with relatively few changes. Those she did make were written in the margins, above the line, or on the back of the facing page. The next day, what she had written would be typed by the woman she paid to handle her correspondence. She needed help and enjoyed her secretary’s regular company.

Ngaio found the recovery from her mother’s death ‘agonising’. Her father became a constant companion. ‘[When] we built a hut in the Temple Basin above Arthur’s Pass, he carried weatherboarding with the best of us up steep flanks in a nor’-west gale.’ One of Henry’s great gifts to his daughter was his spring of youthful energy. He gave her the ability to be physically and mentally young, long after youth usually lasted. In the latter part of his life he drew on it himself, tramping vast distances with her into the mountains. He played tennis, gardened, and continued his secretarial work. He was, in Ngaio’s mind at least, a Peter Pan figure who immersed himself in a Neverland of late-night Lexicon games and mild-mannered drinking sessions with the boys. She felt almost parental towards him, but there was a cantankerous side that could suddenly rear up and remind her of their true relationship. At a point when she could have become independent, the tables were turned, and Ngaio the only child began caring for her only parent. It worked because of an arrested development in them both: he was not looking for another wife and she was not searching for a husband—or even a life substantially different from that of her childhood at Marton Cottage.

In many ways Ngaio was an orthodox person, yet her dress was startling for a woman in New Zealand in the mid1930s. A photograph taken by her friend Olivia Spencer Bower in 1936 shows her seated on the back of a chair surrounded by fellow artists. She is conspicuous in her mannish slacks, tie and beret. Yet she wore her ‘cette monsieur-dame‘ dress to shock. Why? Was it to delineate herself as a modern woman? Was it to identify herself as a lesbian? Certainly, she knew it would signal both to some, and so this ambiguity may have been deliberate. But an androgynous persona was also commanding and theatrical, and more accurately perhaps expressed the woman she was. A person of independent means defined not by femininity, marriage or motherhood, but by her talent and skill as a writer and director. ‘I think I’m one of those solitary creatures that aren’t the marrying kind,’ she would later write in her autobiography.

But this was only partly true, because there was a gregarious side to Ngaio that was satisfied by her women friends. She began picking up the threads of her old life. During the summer of 1933-34, she went on trips to the mountains with her Canterbury College School of Art friends. With her father’s help they built a hut at Temple Basin so they could live and paint together. She loved the beauty and solitude of the magnificent ranges. On hot days the mountains became a suffocating crucible of stillness and heat, yet she found it cleansing. Olivia Spencer Bower painted Ngaio at her easel sketching the foothills of the Southern Alps on a dazzling Canterbury day, squinting into the brilliant sun, absorbed in her work, at one with the environment. Concentration on her painting and comfort in the company of old friends eased Ngaio’s grief. Although Spencer Bower made a number of images of Ngaio working in the landscape, it was Phyllis Bethune (née Drummond Sharpe) who was her most constant companion, and other friends such as Evelyn Page (née Polson), and Rata Lovell-Smith (née Bird) travelled with her to paint in places like the Aclands’ station at Peel Forest in South Canterbury, and the Mackenzie Country.

In the years immediately after the First World War, Christchurch had become the country’s leading centre for the visual arts. Canterbury College School of Art was buoyant and had a reputation as one of the best art schools in the country, known for its painters, especially those who painted landscape en plein air. The city had an active exhibition culture. ‘The Canterbury Society of Arts [CSA] was considered the most lively of New Zealand art societies.’

Ngaio and her friends were the cream of the art school. Ngaio had been enrolled there full-time from 1915 to 1919. Also attending had been Page, Lovell-Smith and Haszard; Spencer Bower had begun part-time study in 1920. Collectively, they represented a phenomenal blossoming of post-war female talent. Not only did they share the ambition to become professional painters, but they knew it was an unconventional role. ‘Life at an Art School is considered by many to be Bohemian; this, to a great extent is true,’ wrote Rhona Haszard. ‘To people passing along Rolleston Avenue…we may certainly appear eccentric as we wander about in our paint-dabbed smocks, singing tuneful quartets.’ As students, they ate meals together between classes, ‘worked at anatomy, perspective and composition’, and had parties there after evening session ended at nine o’clock. Leslie Greener remembered Haszard, ‘a lithe, slim figure’ among her studio friends, ‘curled up in a chair strumming on a banjo while everyone sat round on the floor and crooned accompaniment’.

But heady student days gave way to the serious task of earning a living. In spite of her dramatic and literary successes, Ngaio had always seen herself making her living from art. ‘It had never occurred to me that I would attempt to be anything else in life but a serious painter: there was no question of looking upon art as a sort of obsessive hobby—it was everything.’ Her college years seemed to substantiate this dream. She practically paid her own way through art school with scholarships. She won the Pure Art Scholarship and Medal, worth £25, in 1917 and 1918, and two awards for figure composition in her final year. Art appeared to be her destiny. In order to establish her career, she exhibited with the CSA from 1919 to 1926, and also intermittently with the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts (NZAFA) in Wellington and art societies in Auckland and Dunedin. However, even though she was mentioned positively in reviews, her receipts were modest.

As students, Evelyn Page and Ngaio had shared a studio, along with Haszard, Edith Wall, Margaret Anderson and Viola Macmillan Brown, and after leaving art school they kept it on. By 1927, it had become an established sanctuary away from the strictures of Victorian upbringings and families. They were delighted, not just to escape there, but also to assert their professionalism as artists. ‘We rented a small room in Hereford Street,’ recalled Evelyn Page many years later.

It was a tiny room…then I think it was Edith Wall who discovered the old Press building…right in the middle of Cashel Street, was vacant…and it was a whole top floor…it was brick and you had to go up a fire escape to get into it and…there were great big square windows all round so the lighting wasn’t too bad but it was very cold so we had points put in and heaters, electric heaters. We couldn’t afford too many of those so we had kerosene heaters as well…we thought we’d…have exhibitions…and we did.

They whitewashed the walls, and ‘Ngaio thought instead of having tea and sandwiches’ at the opening, that they should have ‘a hock cup…or a claret cup’. So they pooled their money and bought a ‘vast basin’ of wine. They invited their friends, then ‘we thought, we’d better invite some possible buyers…so we looked up the telephone book and rooted out all the wealthy old dowagers of Christchurch and invited them too and up they came, up the fire escape and had their hock cup and ran round buying indiscriminately—it was marvellous!’

In fact, this was a point of radical departure for art in New Zealand: the beginning of The Group. The exhibition, with its ‘hock cup’ and dowagers, was its inaugural show. Group members were looking for an opportunity to show their work outside the CSA’s annual Edwardian clutter of pictures. ‘There [was no] deliberate attitude towards the Arts of Christchurch,’ said Ngaio of The Group’s genesis. ‘There were no politics. We were not a bunch of rebels, or angries, we were a group of friends.’ They were discerning friends, though, Page remembered: ‘We invited…only the newest, the most modern of our contemporaries.’ The Group would become one of New Zealand’s most important outlets for progressive painters.

Ngaio was a relatively pedestrian painter, and her talent glowed dimly in a constellation of stars. Page was beginning to realize her talent as a dazzling colourist who could apply Impressionistic brush strokes of impasto paint with a skill that looked effortless. Equally, Haszard was distinguishing herself, with pictures painted in the British Camden Town style composed of luscious paint-loaded mosaics of bold Post-Impressionist colour. Other talented painters—Spencer Bower, Rata and Colin Lovell-Smith, Rita Angus and Louise Henderson—were also establishing careers. In this context, many of Ngaio’s Impressionistic scenes of New Zealand High Country looked staid and formulaic. They were competent but tepid: she laid down the bones of the landscape but not its heart.

By the time Ngaio joined her women friends (and two men, W.H. Montgomery and William Baverstock), in their new Cashel Street studio in 1927, she realized that art would never be more than an abiding passion. She showed with The Group in 1927 and 1928, then left for England.

Her friend Rhona Haszard had departed two years earlier, and many of their contemporaries followed. It was difficult for artists to establish themselves in New Zealand without the authority of overseas experience, so they were lured away. A few, like painter Frances Hodgkins, remained abroad, but most came back. The news, therefore, of Haszard’s death after a four-storey fall from a tower in Alexandria, in February 1931, sent shockwaves through conservative Christchurch. Many, already suspicious of her second husband Leslie Greener, believed he had killed her because of an affair she had while staying in London. Rumours abounded. His decision to bring his wife’s paintings back to New Zealand and sell them reignited controversy. Ngaio almost certainly saw Greener’s memorial exhibition, which he toured nationally in 1933, the year after she returned and began exhibiting herself. She showed with the CSA in 1933, and The Group in 1935, and continued to exhibit intermittently with The Group until 1947.

Among the paintings she showed at the CSA in 1933 was Native Market, Durban, taken from the photograph and quick sketch she had made on her voyage to England. Ironically, there is more visual interest in the bustling human energies and vibrant marketplace colour than she ever achieved in the remote Canterbury landscapes she loved to paint. The simplified forms of the figures and produce have a sculptural quality reminiscent of Paul Cézanne and his precept that Nature can be structurally reduced to the cone, the cylinder or the cube. She was influenced by work she saw in Europe, but also by Australian Margaret Preston’s magnificent Post-Impressionist distillations of white-on-white: in Native Market, Durban, these are in the white folds and twists of turbans, veils and dresses.

Her painting In the Quarry was exhibited at the CSA in 1935. The subject is a group of local relief workers building a section of Valley Road close to her home on the Cashmere Hills. She looks down on the scene from above. The summer day is hot, and men work, sit, stand or laze lethargically in wheelbarrows. The work is a vivid communication of an ordinary scene. Forms are simplified and geometric. Captivating contrasts of work and repose, blazing light and deep shadow, and the warm cream of a dusty dirt road cut through lush green grass, activate the canvas. At The Group exhibition that opened in early September 1932, English émigré and Post-Impressionist Christopher Perkins showed four oils and a group of drawings. His hard-edged naturalism, with its simplified form and colour, pointed to a new direction in New Zealand art. Ngaio had seen the exhibition, and his drawing Employed, reproduced in Art New Zealand in September 1932. This almost certainly influenced her In the Quarry. She called it Still Life for the CSA catalogue, a pun as her novel titles often were. After the ‘mistake’ was pointed out by a literal-minded art society official, the painting was retitled and entered in the correct section.

But just as Ngaio was beginning to embrace modern ideas in painting, her writing career swept her off in another direction. Enter a Murderer was published in 1935, along with The Nursing-Home Murder, which was to secure her place as a leading crime writer in Britain. The year before she had suffered from gynaecological problems. ‘I spent three months in hospital undergoing a series of minor operations and a final snorter of a major one.’ As a result, quite devastatingly for her, she could never have children. While she was in hospital Ngaio began thinking of another story, about a murder that occurred, not on a stage, but on the table of an operating theatre. The parallels are obvious. It was a closed environment with distinct hierarchies and procedures, and the same kind of intensity of performance. But the stakes were higher and life routinely in balance. Imagine if the patient were the British Home Secretary, fighting for his life after a ruptured appendix, and everyone around the operating table had a motive for killing him…

Again, in The Nursing-Home Murder, a play within the novel becomes a metaphor for the action. In the sterile chill of the anteroom, nurse Jane Harden and Sister Marigold help the two surgeons into their white gowns.

‘Seen this new show at the Palladium?’ asked [assistant surgeon Dr] Thoms.

‘No,’ said Sir John Phillips.

‘There’s a one-act play. Anteroom to a theatre in a private hospital. Famous surgeon has to operate on a man who ruined him and seduced his wife. Problem—does he stick a knife into the patient?’

Phillips, deeply affected by Dr Thoms’s description of the play, turns slowly to look at him. Nurse Jane Harden stifles an involuntary cry. Unable to contain himself any longer, he asks suddenly how the play ended. Dr Thoms replies, ‘It ended in doubt. You were left to wonder if the patient died under the anaesthetic, or if the surgeon did him in. As a matter of fact, under the circumstances, no one could have found out.’ As Roderick Alleyn will later point out, the operating theatre is ‘the ideal setting for a murder. The whole place was cleaned up scientifically—hygienically—completely—as soon as the body of the victim was removed. No chance of a fingerprint, no significant bits and pieces left on the floor. Nothing.’

The Home Secretary, Sir Derek O’Callaghan, dies of a lethal dose of hyoscine administered on the operating table. Because she needed medical knowledge, Ngaio took on her only collaborator, Irish surgeon Dr Henry Jellett. She also consulted Sir Hugh Acland. Both men were her specialists while she was in hospital, and friends of the Rhodeses. What is new about The Nursing-Home Murder is its sustained focus on the political rather than just the criminally deviant. ‘Bolshie’ Nurse Banks’s impassioned speeches against capitalism introduce villainous ideology, which is any belief against the status quo. The veins stand out on her neck; her eyes bulge; she is fired with political fervour.

‘And for that reason [Sir Derek’s] the more devilish,’ announced Banks with remarkable venom. ‘He’s done murderous things since he’s been in office…He’s directly responsible for every death from under-nourishment that has occurred during the last ten months. He’s the enemy of the proletariat.’

Even Alleyn’s generous helping of upper-crust pie does not escape her scrutiny. ‘I know your type—the gentleman policemen—the latest development of the capitalist system. You’ve got where you are by influence while better men do bigger work for a slave’s pittance. You’ll go, and all others like you, when the Dawn breaks.’ Although Nurse Banks is like a bad fairy at a Society wedding, she cannot be the killer: it is a golden rule of Golden Age crime that personal motive can never be superseded by the political.

After the book was finished, Ngaio decided to produce it as a play, Exit Sir Derek, with a group of local amateur actors. Once again, she called upon the expertise of Henry Jellett. He was a perfectionist, insisting on endless rehearsals. A stickler for detail, he made a ‘startlingly realistic false abdomen with an incision and retractors’. He stationed a fully trained theatre sister in the wings to prepare the patient. He gave strict instructions to the cast that if a glove was dropped it must not be retrieved. The opening night audience was peppered with doctors, who came to see their colleague’s collaboration. The last Act was set in the operating theatre. To make it realistic, Jellett released ether into the audience. The medical malpractice began when the assistant surgeon dropped a glove, and picked it up off the floor. (The audience laughed, especially the doctors.) Meanwhile, beneath the felt abdomen the actor writhed in muffled gasps of pain. In the wings, the overexcited sister had clipped his flesh rather than the felt with the retractors. The nauseating smell of ether plus the graphic unveiling of the felt incision was too much for the circle. An ‘actress from an English touring company screamed and fainted’ and, with difficulty, was carried out of the auditorium. In spite of initial hitches, the play opened to packed houses, and Ngaio considered sending the script to her agent, but decided it was too similar to another American stage play.

The rhythms of life at Marton Cottage were predictable and sedate, yet Ngaio’s books were far from tranquil. In Death in Ecstasy, published in 1936, she faced her phobia: poison. ‘The House of the Sacred Flame, its officials, and its congregation are all imaginative and exist only in Knocklatchers Row,’ Ngaio wrote in her foreword. This was a touch of irony, because in Christchurch the story was instantly recognizable.

Forty years before, the fictional House of the Sacred Flame’s flesh-and-blood forebears had existed in the town’s Latimer Square. American Arthur Bently Worthington had taken the globe, spun it around and chosen the most far-flung outpost to escape to. He was one of life’s real villains, a polygamist (with nine wives), a thief, a defrauder, a fake. Worthington, notorious in the United States for marrying wealthy women and taking their money, arrived in Christchurch in January 1890, with his ‘soul mate’, the already-married Mary Plunkett, international journal editor for the Christian Scientist sect, and her two children.

Worthington and Plunkett, renamed Sister Magdala, began a sect called the Students of Truth, based on a junket of beliefs that included pantheism and free love. By August 1892, with vast amounts pledged by the people of Christchurch, the sect built ‘the imposing Temple of Truth, and next to it a “magnificent 12-room residence” for the Worthington family’. Worthington’s mistake was to cross Sister Magdala, whom he banished with a splinter group to Australia when finances got low. She, and a collection of concerned Christchurch clergy, exposed Worthington in the press. The tide turned in September 1897, and at a series of revival lectures at the Oddfellows’ Hall 6,000 angry people gathered in Lichfield Street to protest against Worthington; the crowd had to be forcibly dispersed. Ngaio’s father, an arch sceptic and evangelizing atheist, chuckled over the episode until he nearly collapsed. His daughter was two years old when Worthington met his Armageddon, and Henry Marsh delighted in retelling the story as she grew up.

The version Ngaio tells in Death in Ecstasy is slightly different. Outside is blackness. The wind blows and rain beats against the temple roof as Sister Cara Quayne reaches a state of dishevelled ecstasy.

Her arms twitched and she mouthed and gibbered like an idiot, turning her head from side to side…She raised the cup to her lips. Her head tipped back and back until the last drop must have been drained. Suddenly she gasped violently. She slew half round as if to question the priest. Her hands shot outwards as though she offered him the cup. Then they parted inconsequently. The cup flashed as it dropped to the floor. Her face twisted into an appalling grimace. Her body twitched violently. She pitched forward like an enormous doll, jerked twice and then was still.

Ngaio’s equivalent of ‘Sister Magdala’ was dead.

‘To this day, on the rare occasions that I use poison in a detective story, I am visited by a ludicrous aftertaste of my childish horrors.’ Ngaio must have spent some time exorcizing the after-image of Cara Quayne, ‘eyes wide open and protuberant…At the corners of the mouth were traces of a rimy spume. The mouth itself was set, with the teeth clenched and the lips drawn back, in a rigid circle.’ This was a death mask of rigor mortis brought on by the ingestion of cyanide of potassium.

Ngaio researched every aspect of her novels, especially the deaths. She knew police procedure and kept a diagram on her wall of the hierarchy of command at New Scotland Yard. Her shelves at home began to fill with books on poisons, medical jurisprudence, and forensic medicine. She consulted her medical friends and the reference section of the local library. Ngaio never wrote anything unless she investigated it before Alleyn. The vividness of Cara Quayne’s ugly end, and its power as an image ‘to linger in the memory’, came from its authenticity, and from the fact that, as crime writer and critic P.D. James has said, ‘Death is never glamorised nor trivialised in Ngaio Marsh.’ In Death in Ecstasy, Ngaio harnesses the power of death to shock more fully than in her previous novels, and this she would refine further. Her fear of poison unlocked her imagination to explore the experience with a horror that was more than just intellectual.

Heroin was another substance she researched for her novel, because worshippers at the House of the Sacred Flame are hooked on more than just religion. Their highs come from heroin-laced cigarettes and a chalice of Le Comte’s Invalid Port spiked with pure alcohol. The sect, inspired by the teachings of Father Jasper Garnette, Ngaio’s Worthington figure, is broadly pantheistic, with Scandinavian deities Wotan and Thor mixed with a hint of free love between Garnette and his ‘Chosen Vessel’, Cara Quayne. ‘Garnette seems actually to have persuaded her that the—the union—was blessed, had a spiritual significance,’ announces Alleyn in disgust. Cara, a young, gullible neophyte, has made a £5,000 donation to the temple building fund. She is hypnotized by Garnette’s religious prognostications and hooked on heroin, which, along with cocaine, was a favoured drug of 1930s detective fiction writers. Narcotics such as these were known as the abuse of the upper classes. It became fashionable to write about drugs and drug trafficking, along with blackmail, jewel robbery, embezzlement, trophy-wife snatching and will jumping. ‘Pin-point pupils’ were synonymous with high-society doping. Well-connected Arthur Surbonadier is shot at the Unicorn Theatre because of his drug connections. Wealthy Cara Quayne dies in an ecstasy of unwitting addiction. Drugs would become a regular theme in Ngaio’s novels.

Death in Ecstasy makes teasing reference to Ngaio’s colleagues in crime. She is playing with the reader and with other writers of detective fiction. It is halfway through the story and Alleyn and Nigel Bathgate are ‘taking stock’:

‘Look here,’ said Nigel suddenly, ‘let’s pretend it’s a detective novel. Where would we be by this time? About halfway through, I should think. Well who’s your pick [for the murderer]?’

‘I am invariably gulled by detective novels [Alleyn replied]…You see in real detection herrings are so often out of season.’

‘Well, never mind, who’s your pick?’

‘It depends on the author. If it’s Agatha Christie, Miss Wade’s occulted guilt drips from every page. Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter would plump for Pringle, I fancy. [Freeman Wills Croft’s] Inspector French would go for Ogden.’

This is a delicious irony, a playful piece of unconscious self-consciousness that underscores the real nature of Alleyn’s and Bathgate’s existence compared with their fictional colleagues. Ngaio’s humour, her increased confidence as a writer, and her respect for practitioners like Christie, Sayers, and Freeman Wills Croft inspired this very public private joke. She also paid her respects to Arthur Conan Doyle. ‘I receive facts…as a spider does flies,’ announces Alleyn in Holmesian style, and Bathgate makes this slightly nauseating comment: ‘I am your Watson, and your worm. You may both sit and trample on me. I shall continue to offer you the fruits of my inexperience.’

Ngaio would return to the theme of human gullibility in the face of religious sham, but never again with quite the same echo of reality. ‘Damn, sickly, pseudo, bogus, mumbojumbo,’ says Alleyn with great violence about Father Garnette, and those were Ngaio’s thoughts. As an adult she was sceptical about all religion. She grieved for the loss of her adolescent fervour, wanted to believe in Christianity, but the leap of faith became a chasm.

Ngaio was the only agnostic Queen of Crime. Agatha Christie slept all her life with a crucifix by her bed; Dorothy Sayers was a theologian and a devout, if not always practising, Christian; and Margery Allingham became an avid follower of Christianity in her later years. Ronald Knox was the Roman Catholic chaplain at Oxford University when he formulated the precepts of Golden Age detective fiction in his ‘Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes’, published in 1928. His precepts were steeped in Christian ideology. For the Queens of Crime, writing about murder was not a betrayal of Faith but an affirmation, the Christian theme of sin and expiation played over and over again. The murder victim was the sacrificial lamb, given up so that the agent of sin, the murderer, could be found out and exorcized. The detective was the high priest, the detective story a modern apocrypha. Ngaio may have lost faith in the Christian message, but she never tired of retelling its story.

In the evenings, when she began a new book, Ngaio wandered from room to room. In perpetual motion she formed the ideas, and it was often daybreak before they flowed freely. She slept, then waited again until nightfall to begin bringing her characters alive. Her nocturnal habits meant she rose late, but the rest of the day was free for the theatre and to paint. Exit Sir Derek reconnected her with repertory, which was lively in the city. Stepping onto the stage took her back to her beginnings. As a child she had written a play in rhyming couplets for a cast of six, called Cinderella, and at St Margaret’s Bundles and The Moon Princess. It was the arrival of the Allan Wilkie Shakespeare Company in 1915 that rekindled her interest in writing for the theatre. She was transfixed, as if she was watching the progress of a miraculous comet across the sky. ‘The opening night of Hamlet was the most enchanted I was ever to spend in the theatre.’ English actor-manager Wilkie, his striking actress wife Frediswyde Hunter-Watts, and their travelling company played to audiences in the Far East, North America and Australasia. They were the remnant of a bygone era, but to a centre starved of professional theatre they seemed rare and illustrious. People queued for tickets, Ngaio and her student friends cut evening art classes, and for two weeks Shakespeare took Christchurch by storm.

Ghosts, gravediggers and Danes walked the ramparts of Ngaio’s quiet nights. She went to Hamlet a number of times. The season ended too quickly, and as abruptly as it had arrived the company was gone. The experience had been ephemeral, like a shadow she wanted to pin down, so between the company’s first and third visits to Christchurch she wrote a romantic regency drama called The Medallion. She hoped Allan Wilkie would cast a professional eye over it. Her mother encouraged her. Towards the end of 1919, they braved the ordeal of handing the script in at the theatre with a note, then seeing Allan Wilkie in person at the Clarendon Hotel. As always, Ngaio was tentative about her writing. The play was mannered and rhetorical, but her raw enthusiasm captured Wilkie’s attention.

After art classes had finished one afternoon, Ngaio returned to her shared studio with her paint-box slung over her shoulder. She climbed the stairs, walked in, and there they were—Allan Wilkie and his wife. ‘“I obtained the address,” Mr. Wilkie said in his resonant actor’s voice, “from your father. I have a suggestion to make…How…would you like to be an actress?”‘ He thought that if she was going to write for the theatre she needed experience on the stage. She was speechless, stunned. It was as if Wilkie had opened a door through which she glimpsed her future. She had two hours to make up her mind. The Wilkies were leaving town almost immediately, but would employ her when they returned, if her parents agreed.

Ngaio’s ‘yes’ was immediate, and her father’s followed; Rose Marsh was harder to please. But Peter Tokareff’s suicide was still fresh in her mind, and now there was a new threat. Her daughter had another besotted suitor, this time a middle-aged Englishman. Once again, Ngaio was flattered, but out of her depth.

‘Your father,’ [Rose] said, ‘will speak to him.’

And so he did and to some effect. ‘I felt damn’ sorry for the fellow…He made such a thing of it…He’ll get over it, no doubt.’

But the Englishman began stalking Ngaio. ‘One night, when I was alone in the studio, he came up the stairs and stood…in utter silence on the landing while I sat petrified and sick, on the other side of the door.’

Fear forced Rose to agree to Ngaio’s touring with the Wilkies, plus the fact that she was greatly impressed with Allan Wilkie, who was a consummate charmer. Henry was amused: ‘So you’re off…with the raggle-taggle-gypsies, O.’ Ngaio was ecstatic. Rose felt she had been painted into a corner. While she waited for the company to return to Christchurch, Ngaio took a relieving position as lady editor at the Sun newspaper. She wrote about clothes, society hostesses and ‘concocted paragraphs to fill in the gaps’. Her anticipation mounted.

Ngaio was 25 years old and had never been out of the South Island. She would be living away from her parents and enjoying the pleasures of travel and adult life for the first time. ‘On a warm autumn morning I reported at the Theatre Royal, walked under the ringing iron stairs I had so often climbed and went in at the Stage Door. The world of glue-size, canvas, dust and shadows engulfed me.’ They played a season in Christchurch. The parts for Ngaio were limited. She had a deep contralto voice, which seemed odd in a woman, and was taller than the average leading man. As Wilkie remarked, ‘Only I…am at liberty to take six foot strides on this stage.’ To ensure she took demure steps, Ngaio hobbled her legs together above the knees with a stocking. The kindly Wilkie found her work in spite of this. She played a dubious ‘Franco-Teutonic’ maid in a spy thriller called The Luck of the Navy, where the main character was tied to a chair (like Nigel in A Man Lay Dead); an ex-WAAF, now housemaid, in A Temporary Gentleman; a vicious craggy crone in the farce The Rotters; and, in Hindle Wakes, yet another maid.

Rehearsals were arduous and Wilkie was a hard taskmaster, but Ngaio’s energy and enthusiasm seemed endless. ‘I learnt how actors work in consort,’ she wrote, ‘like musicians, how they shape the dialogue in its phrases, build to points of climax, mark the pauses and observe the tempi.’ This was an apprenticeship she would draw on for the rest of her life. ‘Without knowing it I laid down a little cellar of experiences which would one day be served up as the table wines of detective cookery.’ The people she met in the company fascinated her. She tended to see them as types: the male heart-throb, his meltingly magnificent woman, the character actor, the juvenile, the straight man, and the comic. She relished the details that made the actors like the characters they played.

After Christchurch, there was a season in Auckland. They took the ferry from Lyttelton to Wellington, then a 14-hour train journey. Ngaio’s senses were heightened by exhilaration.

I, however, persisted in my rapture. It was the first of many such occasions and I was to grow familiar with the look of my fellow-players in transit: the ones who read, the ones who stared out of the window, the ones who slept, the cheerful, the morose and the resigned. Mr. Wilkie and Pat Scully [the stage manager], their shoulders hunched and their heads nodding with the motion of the train, played endless games of two-handed whist. Mrs Wilkie read.

Through the winter they travelled up and down New Zealand with their four modern plays. Spring brought the end of a life she had come to love. Wilkie reformed a Shakespearian company in Australia, taking key players with him, but minor roles, especially maids, were dispensable. ‘On a wet night in Wellington I said good-bye and returned alone in the ferry to Christchurch. One of the first things I did was to wrap up Gramp’s book and sent it to Mr. Wilkie. In return I received a ring of which, he wrote…“It is a trifle of some reputed antiquity.”‘ Ngaio, an only child, had tasted life with a carnival company of actors. Like a desert flower, the experience bloomed, then vanished. She would spend a lifetime trying to recapture its brilliance.

‘It wasn’t easy to settle down again: to return to a pattern, that, however freely designed, turned about a small house, one’s parents and a circle of quiet friends.’ Her sepia existence seemed drab by comparison. She painted with her friends and wrote for the Sun. But life was insular and restrained, until the Rosemary Rees English Comedy Company rolled into town and she was invited to tour again. Her mother was adamant that it would ‘lead to nothing…Why do you want to do it? It’s not the right kind of thing for you. I know.’ But Ngaio was determined.

The tour was fraught from the beginning. The juvenile, who had no understudy, came down with scarlet fever. He had a big part and it was a disaster. Ngaio had an out-of-body experience: ‘I heard myself saying that I thought I could play the boy, “Jimmy”‘—and she did. There were costume difficulties. She could fit Jimmy’s fumigated suits, but cramming her long hair under a wig was torture. In desperation Rosemary Rees suggested she cut it. When Ngaio wrote to her mother, asking for permission, she received a ‘snorter’ of a reply by return post. Rees followed with a pleading epistle, but Rose Marsh was intractable. ‘She was unable to discover,’ Ngaio recalls, ‘why it should be imagined the antics of a music-hall soubrette could reconcile her to the thought of her daughter masquerading in male attire in a third-rate company.’ Rose almost ordered Ngaio home, but was tempered by her own fond feelings for the stage. If she had to abide her daughter playing a boy, there would be no haircut.

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.