Commentators were now consistently identifying the qualities that set Ngaio apart from the plethora of other detective writers: her characterization, her narrative ability, her ingenuity, and especially her humour, which ‘performs the important function of making them more palatable’. The writer for The Times Literary Supplement thought it ‘well written’ and enjoyable, but expressed relief that Alleyn’s ‘romance, which figured so prominently in Miss Marsh’s last novel, is mercifully thrust into the background’. Only the Daily Herald had a problem with her treatment of older women. ‘Spinsters are having a tough time in detective fiction just now. And it is the women writers who are responsible.’
Ironically, Ngaio was unmarried and 44 years old herself when she concocted this bleak picture of spinsterhood. She knew the clichés perhaps better than her colleagues, and feasted on them unmercifully for her inspiration. Christie had been more sympathetic in her creation of Miss Marple. In Overture to Death, Ngaio’s spinsters are contrasted with an attractive, young, newly engaged couple and a straw-blonde femme fatale, who has lured the local doctor away from his invalid wife. And there is Alleyn’s love letter to Troy: ‘…shall we have a holiday cottage in Dorset?…high up in the world so that you could paint the curves of the hills…Shall we have one? I’m going to marry you next April, and I love you with all my heart.’ Ngaio offers a polarity that suggests either romantic companionship or sexual frustration and doom. But this is conventional light fiction, untrammelled by political correctness, and Ngaio is equally hard on her geriatric men.
Mr. Saul Tranter was an old man with a very bad face. His eyes were no bigger than a pig’s and they squinted, wickedly close together, on either side of his mean little nose. His mouth was loose and leered uncertainly, and his few teeth were objects of horror. He smelt very strongly indeed of dirty old man, dead birds and whisky.
Ngaio was a superb creator especially of cameo characters, who had about them a whiff of the stage, which tipped them occasionally towards the ‘stock’. On the whole, the people she created satisfied rather than challenged readers’ established prejudices. Ngaio’s spinsters were as many in mainstream society imagined them to be: sick and frustrated.
Interestingly, Nigel Bathgate makes one of his last appearances in Overture to Death. Alleyn is not pleased to discover that Nigel is in Pen-Cuckoo and is less willing to take him into his confidence. When he and Fox are going over ‘the facts’, Alleyn suggests that Nigel is out of the loop:
We are, as might be…two experts on a watch-tower in the middle of a maze. ‘Look at the poor wretch,’ we say and nudge each other, ‘there he goes into the same old blind alley. Jolly comical,’ we say, and then we laugh like anything. Don’t we, Fox?
In the next novel, Alleyn and Troy are already married and she will increasingly take over Nigel’s role of detective’s stooge, although she remains an ancillary character. She introduces a new dynamic around which some of the future plots will turn. But it will be a cerebral relationship. Commentators complained that their pillow talk was stilted. The critic for The Times Literary Supplement was not alone in thinking romance was ‘not Miss Marsh’s metier’ and that some of the dialogue left ‘one a bit hot under the collar’. Romance writing was not Ngaio’s strong suit, and she kept it to a minimum. But perhaps it was her restraint that made her love scenes alluring—for alluring they often were—and decades of subsequent books groaning with sex have probably done nothing to alter their appeal.
But Alleyn’s most consistent and long-serving companion in crime is neither Troy nor Nigel, but Inspector Fox, whose role in investigations grows after his first appearance in Enter a Murderer in 1935. He is the huge, lumbering, gentle giant, a counter-balance to the highly-strung, fine-boned, fast-moving Alleyn, who is regularly likened to a cat or a faun. They complement each other. It is an attraction of opposites. As writer Kathryne Slate McDorman points out, ‘Fox represents what most of the upper and upper-middle classes of the early twentieth century would have regarded as the best of working-class virtues’. He is solid, steady and unshakable in his loyalty to his superior; he can be sensitive or brutish; he is immune to social snobbery. Fox is Alleyn’s secret weapon with the working classes. Alleyn’s own social background sets him in upstairs amber, but Fox has the flexibility to move between floors, questioning anyone from the butler to the scullery maid with impunity.
Alleyn and Fox’s partnership is tested in the last novel directly inspired by Ngaio’s sojourn in south England. While in Cornwall she stayed in the fishing village of Polperro, which was the model for Ottercombe in Death at the Bar. Fox is poisoned in an attempt by the murderer to foil the investigation. In an excellent sherry, Fox ingests a near-fatal dose of a cyanide-based rat poison. As he desperately tries to save Fox’s life, Alleyn touchingly realizes what his colleague means to him.
Alleyn scarcely knew he had a body of his own. His body and breath, precariously and dubiously, belonged to Fox…
‘Fox,’ said Alleyn. ‘Fox, my dear old thing.’ Fox’s lips moved. Alleyn took his handkerchief and wiped that large face carefully.
Overture to Death was dedicated to ‘The Sunday Morning Party: G.M.L. Lester, Dundas and Cecil Walker, Norman and Miles Stacpoole Batchelor and MY FATHER’, and Death at the Bar was based on pub culture around a dartboard, and a lethal game of cyanide-tipped darts. This was reminiscent of the Marton Cottage dartboard, and her father and his buddies who gathered around to play.
‘On the whole ours was a masculine household,’ Ngaio remembered in Black Beech. ‘For days on end the only other woman in it was our much loved housekeeper, Mrs Crawford, who looked after my father when I was away…by and large it was a male establishment with the emphasis on my father’s generation rather than my own.’ On Sunday mornings and evenings, and on Tuesday nights, Dundas and Cecil Walker, Henry Jellett, an uncle by marriage known as Unk, and other friends met at Marton Cottage to have dinner and play Lexicon and darts with Ngaio’s father.
She was thinking of home and her obligation to her father, and these novels, published in 1940, reflect that orientation. By April 1938, Ngaio was back in New Zealand. Filial obligation had overpowered her desire to travel. As she would write in the introduction to a radio talk, broadcast in 1943:
The itch for travel is a chronic disease—incurable, insistent, sometimes flaring up, sometimes more or less quiescent…The cure is at best temporary, the treatment curious. For a comfortable home, a rational existence, an ordered routine, & a chosen circle of friends; the patient must substitute a jolting train, a heaving ship, a muddled surge of complete strangers, & an incoherent mode of life…Tormented, during treatment, by blistered heels, lost luggage & a perpetual search for somewhere to lay his head, why does this odd creature desire so ardently the renewal of all the uncomfortable conditions?
The itinerant existence was one she loved, especially with the Rhodes family, who enjoyed a particularly indulgent version of it. Moments of ‘arrival’ made the ordeals of travel melt away. ‘For the incurable & unrepentant traveller; a landfall, a foreign port, the great white lights of a foreign city still unexplored, or the modest lamps of a strange village at the end of a darkling road—these things are happiness.’ But this was happiness she would not experience again for many years. Her father was old and increasingly dependent, and in her travels she had witnessed the seeds of the Jewish Holocaust and the rise of the Nazi Party’s machine in Germany. The Second World War, which began in September 1939, would change Europe’s frontiers to frontlines. It would stop elective travel and force New Zealanders, other than military personnel, to remain at home.
‘It can’t be explained,’ Ngaio wrote of the addiction to travel. ‘It can be appeased in peace time only by indulgence; or in these bad days of war by some such counter-irritant as hard work.’ To stem her desire to travel, Ngaio would work in the theatre and on her books. New Zealand amateur and repertory theatre, thrown back on its own resources, would prove fertile ground.
Iron
ically, too, although the war interrupted so many things, it did not affect the ascendancy of the detective novel. People continued to read crime fiction while bombs rained down and vast casualty lists were posted. Special pocket-sized editions of detective novels were produced for easy reading in bomb shelters, and lending libraries posted crime sections close to bunker entrances. The demand for intriguing puzzle plots would soar.
CHAPTER FOUR
Death Down Under
Don’t pretend to be so feeble!’ cries Roberta in a fury at Henry’s acquiescence.
‘But it’s true,’ Henry explodes with equal vehemence.
We are feeble. We’re museum pieces. Carryovers from another age. Two generations ago we didn’t bother about what we would do when we grew up. We went into regiments, or politics, and lived on large estates…Everything was all ready for us from the moment we were born…Now look at us! My papa is really an amiable dilettante. So, I suppose, would I be if I could go back into the setting, but you can’t do that without money. Our trouble is that we go on behaving in the grand leisured manner without the necessary backing. It’s very dishonest of us, but we’re conditioned to it. We’re the victims of inherited behaviourism.
Roberta Grey and Henry Lamprey are standing on a tussock-covered ridge in South Canterbury’s Mackenzie Country. They have walked up through bush to the lower slope of little Mount Silver, where there is a view over Deepacres sheep station and across the paddocks, roads and shelter belts that stretch as far as the eye can see. Henry’s father, Lord Charles, has bought Mount Silver Station on a whim and renamed it after the family estate in Kent. He has brought his family out to New Zealand and farms the rough unrelenting landscape like a country squire, with a butler, maids, a nanny, and a governess and a French tutor for his six children.
Lord Charles has failed in his attempt to become a runholder. His efforts to assimilate have been so extreme that Henry believes his father has used sheep-dip on his hair. He has proved hopeless, especially with the dogs. He bought four at the exorbitant cost of £20 each, and when he sat on horseback his whistle was so feeble that his mount gazed blissfully into space, the dogs went to sleep and the sheep stood and stared at him in ‘mild surprise’. When he swore and shouted at them, he lost his voice. Henry feels their coming out to New Zealand was a mistake.
Only child Roberta has been drawn into the Lamprey circle since meeting Henry’s sister Frid at boarding school. When the winter holidays came, she stayed at Deepacres, and from then on at weekends and during the long summer break. Enchanted with the Lampreys, she has stayed regularly for two years. But in the midst of this idyllic existence is the sense of impending disaster. They are running out of money. Lady Charles has begun economizing: they will no longer take Punch or the Tatler, and will dispense with table napkins to save laundry bills. A second, cheaper, car is purchased to save taking out the Rolls so often. Of course, they are shocked when these strategies prove insufficient. The decision is made to return to England.
The memory of her 1937-38 stay with the Rhodes family was still vivid as Ngaio wrote Surfeit of Lampreys in 1939. By the end of that year, she realized that she was trapped in New Zealand by the war, so the novel may have been inspired by her need to revisit and pay tribute to the family who had changed her life. By fictionalizing her friends she could relive cherished experiences. In the quiet hours of the morning she mixed real life with fiction to create one of her most acclaimed pieces of writing, and the most personally revealing of all her novels. ‘There can be no doubt,’ wrote Ngaio many years later in Black Beech, ‘however much we may disclaim the circumstance, that fictional characters are pretty often derived, sub-consciously or not, from persons of the writer’s acquaintance.’ She was writing about the Rhodes family, whom she also called the Lampreys in her autobiography. Things were changed in the novel, and a murder or two added, but these people were based on the Rhodeses, and Ngaio’s connection to them had begun before she was born.
The Pakeha settlement of the South Canterbury High Country started with George Rhodes and his brothers in 1851, when they drove a flock of 5,000 sheep south from Banks Peninsula to a tract of land that would become The Levels. This station covered a huge area of 150,000 acres (60,700 hectares), between the Opihi and Pareora rivers, and from the snow-capped Southern Divide to the sea. Within four years the flock was increased to 24,000 sheep.
The Levels’ far-flung boundary lines were subject to sheep rustling. James McKenzie was a poor Gaelic-speaking Scottish immigrant who was found with 1,000 of the Rhodeses’ sheep, which he had rustled. He and his border collie, Friday, proved an elusive pair, slipping through the hands of a posse sent to apprehend them. Even when he was caught, McKenzie escaped. A £1,000 reward was offered for his capture, and it was Sergeant Edward Seager, Ngaio’s grandfather, who arrested him in Lyttelton and was a witness at his trial. As Seager remembered, ‘the only time Mackenzie [sic] showed any emotion was when the dog was produced in court and tried in vain to reach her master’. The giant ginger-haired sheep-stealer broke down. ‘Poor lassie! They’ve got you too!’ he is reputed to have cried. A Rhodes family album contains a photograph of a border collie inscribed ‘Yours faithfully Friday’, and she is said to have ended her days on The Levels as a favourite dog.
George Rhodes died at 47, of a chill he caught dipping sheep, but his family continued, and one branch moved to Fendalton in Christchurch, where young Tahu Rhodes and his sister Marie played with Ngaio before the Marsh family moved to Cashmere. The Rhodes family lived across the lane in a very large house, with a long drive and a lodge at its gate. They had ‘carriages and gigs, a motor, grooms, servants and a nanny’. Ngaio’s friendship with the fairytale family continued at St Margaret’s, where Marie Rhodes was also a pupil. Ngaio visited the Rhodes farm at Tai Tapu on a school trip, which she wrote about for the school magazine.
But it was not until after Tahu Rhodes had been injured at Gallipoli, married Nelly Plunket and had three children that they met again. It was in Christchurch, in June 1924, when Ngaio was directing an Unlimited Charities production of her childhood favourite, Bluebell in Fairyland, and two of the Rhodes children were in the production. ‘After the final performance I went dancing with the Lampreys,’ wrote Ngaio in Black Beech. ‘In the early hours of the morning we drove to their house, twenty miles away in the country. Its doors opened into a life whose scale of values, casual grandeur, cock-eyed gaiety and vague friendliness will bewilder and delight me for the rest of my days. If one can be said to fall in love with a family I fell in love with the Lampreys. It has been a lasting affair.’
After the Rosemary Rees tour, and her own of the North Island with Tor King and Jimmy in 1922, Ngaio had settled in Christchurch, producing plays for amateur societies, and teaching drama at the newly founded Wauchop School of Drama and Dance. At this time an organization called Unlimited Charities began in the city to produce a large annual show for charity. Ngaio and her parents attended the inaugural meeting in rooms above a piano shop. There she met the Honourable Mrs Rhodes, and their friendship began. As a child, Ngaio, the daughter of a bank teller, had been taken to a public procession where she had glimpsed her young contemporary, Nelly Plunket, daughter of the Governor, in an official carriage with a crown on the door. Socially, the friendship was unequal, but time and talent would tie their lives together. Nelly Rhodes became the patron of Unlimited Charities, and her children delighted in the Bluebell in Fairyland production, which was an extravaganza of choreographed dancers, orchestral music and magnificent costuming. Ngaio’s sedate existence was suddenly technicolored. At last she had found the magic ingredient of romance.
The Rhodeses’ weekend parties at Meadowbank, which Ngaio attended, were prominent social occasions. The family ‘lived on a scale probably unmatched in any other New Zealand establishment except Government House’. When the Duke and Duchess of York visited New Zealand in 1927, Meadowbank was on their itinerary, although the duke came alone as his wife had tonsillitis. He
dined with the Rhodeses, and the next evening attended one of their charity cabarets. The royal visit to Meadowbank was ‘typical of a Lamprey occasion’. Both Ngaio and the family were ‘grossly unmusical’, yet a nursery song around the piano seemed to entertain their eminent guest. ‘I can only suppose that he too was unmusical or that we were bad enough to be funny: I know we were bad.’
But these were the glowing embers of a dying way of life. In reality, the Rhodes family lived a precarious existence based on inherited wealth and family remittances. There was always a feeling that it might not last. This did not, however, stop the Rhodeses from being great philanthropists. Life had been generous to them and they were open-handedly generous to others. ‘While the Lampreys did not seem able to earn anything for themselves,’ Ngaio remembered, ‘they were enormously successful in raising princely sums for good causes.’ The Rhodes family sponsored a cabaret and amateur vaudeville group called Touch and Go, which Ngaio produced and toured. Altogether, she estimated the Rhodeses’ earnings for charity at £12,000. Their way of life, though, was difficult to maintain in New Zealand, and then there was the children’s education to consider: as they grew older, English schools were deemed essential. Ngaio’s ‘Brideshead’ days of charity drama mixed with astonishing luxury lasted little more than two years.
Like Roberta Grey, Ngaio was desolate at the Lampreys’ departure. It felt as if summer had gone forever and every day from now on would be a hoar frost. An invitation came for Ngaio to stay with the family in England and she would write a detective novel. A similar invitation comes for Roberta and she will become involved in a murder. Before she began writing Surfeit of Lampreys, Ngaio, at dinner with her surgeon, Sir Hugh Acland, enquired about the quickest and cleanest way of dispatching a victim. He recommended a sharp instrument, perhaps a skewer, pushed through the eye socket into the brain. ‘For Sir Hugh and Lady Acland with my love,’ she wrote in the dedication to the novel. ‘For the one since he has helped me so often with my stories and for the other since she likes stories about London.’ Not only had the Aclands given her advice and encouragement, but their extensive South Canterbury property at Mount Peel was the model that helped her to visualize Mount Silver Station. The plot would revolve around a sudden financial crisis into which the Lampreys had lurched.
Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime Page 13