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Dame Edith Ngaio Marsh (1895-1982) |
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Of all the "Great Ladies" of the English mystery's golden age, including Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh alone survived to publish in the 1980s. Over a fifty-year span, from 1932 to 1982, Marsh wrote thirty-two classic English detective novels, which gained international acclaim. She did not always see herself as a writer, but first planned a career as a painter. "As is always the case, much of what was unearthed turned out to be of no relevance, much was of a doubtful or self-contradictory nature and only a scanty winnowing found to be of real significance. It was as if the components of several jig-saw puzzles had been thrown down on the table and before the one required picture could be assembled, the rest would have to be discarded." (from Grave Mistake by Ngaio Marsh, New York: Jove Book, 1984, pp. 144-145; first published in 1978) Ngaio Marsh was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, the only child of Henry Edward and Rose Elizabeth (Seager) Marsh. Her first name, pronounced "ny-o", is a Maori word, meaning "Reflections on the water", and was chosen by her uncle. Marsh's father, an emigrant from England, was a clerk in the Bank of New Zealand. Rose Elizabeth was a talented amateur actress. Her mother's grandfather was an early colonist in New Zealand. At the age of 15, Marsh entered St. Margaret's College, a
private
school run by the Church of England. During this period, she became
interested in theatre and playwriting. From 1915 to 1920 she attended
Canterbury University College School of Art. Edward Bristed, her childhood
friend and unofficial fiancé, died in December 1917 in action at Flanders. For a period, Marsh taught speech craft at the school of Drama and Dancing in Christchurch. After painting, acting, and producing in the theater in the 1920s, she travelled in 1928 to England, and opened, in partnership with Mrs. Tahu Rhodes, a succesfull interior decorating business in Knightsbridge. Marsh's stay lasted for four years. When her mother became fatally ill, she returned in August 1932 to New Zealand. Rose Marsh died from liver cancer in November. For the following seventeen years, Marsh took care of her elderly father. They lived in Marton Cottage at Cashmere, where he had built a house for his family. Henry Marsh died in September 1948. She missed him much. Marsh's first novel, A Man Lay Dead (1934), which she wrote in London in 1931-32, introduced the detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn: a combination of Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey and a realistically depicted police official at work. Throughout the 1930s Marsh painted occasionally, wrote plays for local repertory societies in New Zealand, and published detective novels. After being diagnosed with a uterine-related cancer, she underwent in 1934 gynaecological surgery in Christchurch. It was performed by Sir Hugh Ackland and Dr. Henry Jellett, a friend of her father. Marsh called him "Papa Jellett." The Nursing Home Murder (1935) was co-written with Jellet. In addition, they adapted the novel as a play. Entitled Exit Sir Derek it was staged in the Little Theatre of Canterbury University College. In 1937 Marsh went to England. Before going back to her home country, she spent six months travelling about Europe. The critic and awarded mystery writer H. R. F. Keating included Surfeit of Lampreys (1940) among the 100 best crime and mystery books ever published. "Her writing is as good as any to be found in crime fiction. Let me end with one sentence from Surfeit of Lampreys that shows it. Roberta is arriving by boat in London. She looks out at the other ships at anchor in the early morning light. 'Stewards,' she says, 'pallid in their undervests, leant out of portholes to stare.' There is an artist in words." (Crime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books by H. R. F. Keating, New York: Carroll & Graf Oublishers, 1988, p. 66) In the center of the story is the Lamprey family, English aristocrats, seen through the eyes of a New Zealand girl. Marsh mixed in occultism with Shakespearean details – Lord Wutherwood's eye is put out as in King Lear, where Shakespeare had the Duke of Gloucester tortured and blinded on stage. During World War II Marsh served in a New Zealand Red Cross
Transport Unit, driving repatriated soldiers in a hospital bus. She
also worked with the drama department of Canterbury University and
settled into a yearly routine that allowed her to spend about nine
months writing a book and three months to mount a production of
Shakespeare by students. With the sponsorship of
D. D. O'Connor, a professional manager, the Cantebury Student Players toured in New Zealand and Australia. Upon returning to England in 1949 Mash founded the British Commonwealth Theatre Company. One of her major directorial assignments include Luigi Pirandello's play Six Characters in Search of an Author, which she first saw in 1932 at the Westminster Theatre. "I hadn't read it. I knew nothing whatever about it and that is the ideal way of seeing this play for the first time. It takes you by the throat and shakes the daylight out of you. If you long above everything to be a director, this is the play that nags and clamours to be done," she later said. (Black Beech and Honeydew: An Autobiography by Ngaio Marsh, Auckland: William Collins Sons & Co., 1981, p. 194; first published in 1966) Working in two countries she would spend the rest of her time between England and New Zealand, writing mysteries during the sea voyages, and in theatrical activities. "She thought that the English landscape, more perhaps than any other, is dyed in the heraldic colours of its own history. It is there, she thought, and until it disintegrates, earth, rock, trees, grass, turf by turf, leaf by leaf and blade by blade, it will remain imperturbably itself. To it, she thought, the reed really is as the oak and she found the notion reassuring." (from Grave Mistake, pp. 13-14) At Marton
Cottage, Marsh had a large personal research library. She liked to
study thoroughly the topics with which she dealt. Curiously,
she disliked writing, according to her cousin and chief inheritor John
Dacres-Manning, but writing also provided her money for the theater
work. Her dedication in producing Shakespearean plays was recognized by
an award from the Order of the British Empire in 1949, and in 1966 she
was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her
services to literature and theater in New Zealand. In 1967 she produced
Twelfth Night to open the new Ngaio Marsh Theatre in Christchurch. Her
last full-scale production, Shakespeare's Henry V, was produced in
1972. Marsh was named in 1978 a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of
America, along with Dame Daphne du Maurier and Dorothy B. Hughes. Her
autobiography, Black Beech and
Honeydew, came out in 1966 (revised in 1981). In 1981 Marsh wrote her own funeral intructions. Marsh died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Christchurch, N.Z., on February 18, 1982. She was buried in the churchyard of Holy Innocents at Mount Peel Station. Her final novel, Light Thickens (1982), which blended theatre and crime, came out posthumously. In the prologue to Death of a Peer (1940), Marsh's Mount Peel homestead was memorialized as "Deepacres." Marsh's best-known character is the Shakespeare-quoting
Inspector
Roderick Alleyn. The name
was created as a compliment to her father, who had attended a public
school founded by the Elizabethan tragedian Edward Alleyn (1566-1626).
In the tradition of Sherlock Holmes, Alleyn has an encyclopedic mind.
He is assisted by Inspector Fox, who first appears in Enter a Murderer
(1935). Other central figures from the earlier books include the
journalist
Nigel Bathgate,
a Watson character from A Man Lay
Dead to Overture to Death
(1939). Nigel was eventually dropped from the
stories in the 1940s; Fox grows gradually more prominent and
takes Nigel's place as a comic character. Later
Alleyn marries Agatha Troy, an absent-minded, thin, shy and funny
painter, whose character was not far from Marsh's own in the 1930s.
Troy is a sympathetic listener and her sharp eye is a great help to
Alleyn. Marsh once revealed that both her agent and publisher were
opposed to her introducing Troy to the series. Like Sayers's Lord Peter
Wimsey, Alleyn has a noble
background, but instead of becoming a diplomat he joined the police
force after returning from World War I. Marsh once said that "Alleyn is
the sort of man I like. I can't trace him to anybody particularly,
though I can think of men of his type I have known and liked". (quoted in Ngaio Marsh: A Companion to the Mystery
Fiction by Bruce Harding, Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2019, p. 24) Four of Marsh's Alleyn stories were set in the theatre, Enter a Murderer, Opening Night (1951), Vintage Murder (1937), and Killer Dolphin
(1966). Events in Overture to Death took place in a small village, Winston
St. Giles, where Alleyn returned occasionally in later books. In some
stories Alleyn solves murders outside England – in Australia and New
Zealand (Vintage Murder, Colour Scheme, Died in the Wool), France (Spinsters in Jeopardy), or in Italy
(When in Rome)
– Alleyn spoke French and Italian. During World War II Alleyn chased
spies, but after the war he continued in the same style as in the
1930s. A modern psychopath appeared in Singing in the Shrouds (1959).
Typical of Marsh's mysteries is vivid characterization and dialogue. The British crime writer and critic Julian Symons praised Marsh's capacity for amused observation of the undercurrents beneath ordinary social intercourse, as in the novel Opening Night. "The first half . . . gives a brilliant picture of the intrigues taking place before the opening of a new play. All this is, as it should be, preparation for the murder that takes place, and we hope that after the murder the book will remain in the same key and that the problems will be resolved as they began, in terms of character. To our disappointment, however, Marsh takes refuge from real emotional problems in the official investigation and interrogation of suspects. The temperature is lowered, the mood has been lost." (Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History by Julian Symons, New York: Viking, 1985, p. 141) Marsh also wrote plays, a television play Evil Liver (Crown Court series, 1975), and a book about New Zealand. In 1978 a New Zealand television company released adaptations of four of her novels as the "Ngaio Marsh Theatre." Although her novels had English protagonists, relied on
British
class structure and social environment, she thought of herself as a New
Zealander. Marsh's long association with the aristocratic Rhodes family
colored her reticent personality, which is portrayed in the novel Blue
Blood by Stevan Eldred-Grigg. Moreover, Marsh did not discuss much about her crime writing. "The more deeply and honestly [the
crime writer] examines his characters," Marsh said, "the
more disquieting becomes the
skulduggery that one is obliged to practise in respect to the guilty
party." (quoted in Deadlier
Than the Male: An Investigation Into Feminine Crime Writing by
Jessica Mann, London: David & Charles, 1981, p. 225) The novels which Marsh set in her home country, Colour Scheme (1943), Vintage Murder, and Died in the Wool (1944), show a sympathy for the Maoris, and a love of the landscape. Like Christie, she mostly avoided making social or political comments on the world she observed in her mystery novels. Nurse Banks in The Nursing Home Murder is a caricature of a Communist and one of the suspects, but Marsh is more interested in the use of hyoscine as a poison than ridiculing her. King Hamlet in Shakespeare's play is murdered by liquid henbane, which contains hyoscine. As one of the student actors, Jack Henderson, recalled, Marsh was "tall, thin, mannish in appearance, flat-chested, rather gawky . . . dressed usually in beautifully cut slacks (less common then than now), large feet with shoes like canal boats, a deep voice—yet intensely feminine withal". (Ngaio Marsh: A Life by Margaret Lewis, Scottsdale, AZ: Poisoned Pen Press, 1998, p. 97) When Henderson married O'Connor's first wife, it upset Marsh deeply, but they remained friends. During her stays in London, Marsh wore expensive clothes to suit her 5-foot-10-inch frame, and drove a Jaguar sports car. Her second Jaguar was a well known vehicle on The South Island of New Zealand. Unlike
her shy heroine, Agatha Troy, Marsh never married, but
she
also denied being lesbian. The only man for whom she allegedly had
romantic feeling was Edward Bristed, her childhood friend, who died
fighting in Belgium during the First World War. She described him in
her autobiography as "my great friend . . . a freckled child,
perhaps a year my senior." (Black Beech and Honeydew: An Autobiography, p. 29) Noteworthy, she had both lesbian and gay characters in
her novels. They were not portrayed in exceptionally positive
ways. Lesbian love is criminalized in Hand
in Glove (1962) "after being ridiculed as the cross-class
passion of an ageing
spinster in adopting a worthless young woman." (From
Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and
Crime Fiction by Susan Rowlands, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001, p. 163) Marsh's
lifelong friend was Sylvia Fox, with whom she made several trips. In
her autobiography she refers to her female companions only as
secretaries/traveling companions, and tells that she fell in love at
the age of 58 with an Russian expatriate, Vladimir Muling, who was a
married man. Marsh maintained a friendship with both members of the
couple. Marsh's fiction releal almost nothing of her inner life, and the same can be said of her autobiography. But she generally speaks more warmly of her father than of her mother. The American mystery writer Dorothy B. Hughes stated in her review, that "you know less of Miss Marsh from her autobiography than you have known from reading her fiction". (Ngaio Marsh: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction, p. 37) In New Zealand, the literary elite did not talk about her books.
Selected writings:
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