Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime

by Joanne Drayton

  After returning to England, Lord Charles goes into business with a man horribly in debt who promptly commits suicide by shooting himself through the head. The Lampreys are left to pay his bills. Roberta Grey arrives in London on the eve of a begging request to Lord Charles’s brother Gabriel, the Marquis of Wutherwood and Rune, for a ‘permanent loan’ of £2,000. He and his wife Violet are to visit the Lampreys at their double flat in a building known as Pleasaunce Court Mansions, on the corner of a fictitious street linking the real Cadogan Square, in Brompton, with Lennox Gardens. The Rhodeses’ double flat had been in a similar building a few blocks away at the back of Sloane Square, on the corner of Cliveden Place and Bourne Street. The newspaper agent where Ngaio bought her exercise books was on Bourne Street; the basement flat where she had written A Man Lay Dead was around the corner in Caroline Terrace. Roberta is living with the Lampreys in the heart of Ngaio’s London. As a sweetener, the Lamprey children have been instructed by their parents to perform an impromptu charade for the marquis and his wife. Interestingly, Roberta is of the Lamprey children’s generation, not their parents’. This circumvents any difficulties implicit in the ménage that developed between Ngaio, Nelly and Tahu. Roberta can and does fall in love with Henry, the Lampreys’ son and heir. In his parents’ generation, whom would she have fallen in love with?

  The charade, an ugly echo of what is about to happen, is an unmitigated disaster because it completely fails to impress, as does the ancient Chinese pot offered to Gabriel as a gift by the Lampreys’ youngest son, Michael. After their improvization is finished, the family, including Gabriel’s wife, Violet, retire to various rooms, leaving Lord Charles and his brother closeted together. Lord Charles makes his supplication, but the miserly Marquis of Wutherwood and Rune is intractable. He storms out of the room, shouting loudly for his wife to join him in the lift. When she arrives, she discovers him dead. The plated-silver skewer used by the Lamprey children in their charade is protruding from Gabriel’s eye. The fur-lined motoring gloves they also used are covered in blood and lying under the chair where the marquis is slumped. Violet screams and screams and screams.

  Ngaio provided readers with a map of the two third-storey flats, joined by a landing that housed the lift and the stairwell. This was common detective fiction practice—to provide some piece of empirical evidence that might hold a key. She included the charred fragments of a note in Death in Ecstasy, and a map of Pen-Cuckoo village in Overture to Death. In 1930, writing in conjunction with Robert Eustace, Dorothy Sayers followed this logic in The Documents in the Case, to the extent that the book was a collection of letters and documents: all the evidence required for the armchair detective—the reader—to solve the crime. Lord Wimsey’s services were not required.

  But Ngaio was too interested in her characters to allow the problem to take over. In fact, it is in Surfeit of Lampreys that Alleyn makes a comment that parallels her own attitude to crime writing. He admits that he gets heartily sick of the monotonous routine of investigation, but people fascinate him and homicide is all about people. Each person is secure inside their psychological ‘bomb-proof shelter’ until the ‘holocaust’ of murder blows their world apart. It is Alleyn’s job in Surfeit of Lampreys to cast an objective eye over a collection of characters who are based on Ngaio’s friends. He summarizes his findings for Nigel Bathgate who, by complete coincidence, is a personal friend of the family’s.

  ‘Boiled down to a few unsympathetic adjectives they came to this: “Charming. Irresponsible. Unscrupulous about money. Good-natured. Lazy. Amusing. Enormously popular.” Do you agree?’

  ‘Nobody knows better than you,’ said Nigel, ‘that people cannot be boiled down into a few adjectives.’

  Alleyn remains sceptical of the Lampreys, calling them, at one point in the investigation, ‘that collection of certifiable grotesques’. His practical, puritanical side will not allow him to embrace their surfeit of self-indulgence. Yet he quietly admires the tenacity of the young colonial, Roberta Grey who uses her ingenuity to fabricate a story to protect her friends. More than once he describes her as a ‘courageous little liar’. And Alleyn is not the only one to see her as resourceful. The Lampreys are in awe, too, and convinced of her aptitude by vague notions of ‘pioneering hardihood’ that deem colonials robust and therefore less accustomed to ‘nervous strain than their English contemporaries’.

  Surfeit of Lampreys explores the tension between the capable colonial of the new world and the addled aristocracy of an old, but now changing world. Ngaio was a colonial who worked prodigiously. Each book she wrote was 60,000-80,000 words long, and with Surfeit of Lampreys she had published 10 novels in seven years. It was an extraordinary output, which she worked hard to maintain with an aging father and household to support. There was more than a little of Ngaio’s mother in Alleyn’s view of the Lampreys. He has evolved from the same privileged stock, but he is a professional policeman, working hard to solve crime and earn a living. That is why, like his creator, he never approves of that aspect of the Lampreys.

  The Lampreys’ flat is the perfect cosy fit for murder, a cramped stage for a confined number of characters. One of the more colourful is Violet, the Marchioness of Wutherwood and Rune. She is involved in spiritualism and ‘sits in the dark’ with what the Lampreys’ Aunt Kit describes as ‘a set of very second-rate sort of people’. But Charlot Lamprey corrects her: ‘Not spiritualism, darling,…Black magic.’ Violet is a necromancer. Her interest in the occult echoes a key reference through the book to Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which provides an ominous backdrop of foreboding and analogous action. Violet is likened to the three weird sisters on the blasted heath, and to the medieval witches Marguerite Loundman of Gegweiler and Anna Ruffa of Douzy. ‘Is it so very unusual among women of her age, restless by temperament, to become hag-ridden by the bogus-occult?’ asks Dr Kantripp of his colleague Dr Curtis.

  The themes of Macbeth haunt the pages of Ngaio’s novels like Banquo’s ghost. ‘Don’t quote from Macbeth. It couldn’t be more unlucky,’ Dinah warns her fiancé in Death in Ecstasy, and in Surfeit of Lampreys it is Henry who sounds the alarm. In theatre circles, he explains, it is considered bad luck to quote from Macbeth off stage. Ngaio consistently uses dramatic language, metaphors, references, stage superstition and actors to give her writing structure, humour, verve and intellectual vitality.

  Perhaps it was always impossible that a Lamprey could commit murder. In the wind-up to Surfeit of Lampreys they inherit Gabriel’s title and money and are saved the pain of a difficult lesson. Roberta cannot believe it as the family sit and make plans for the future, having averted disaster without even trying. They now have two enormous properties and an income of £30,000 a year. She is even more astonished that they still feel poor.

  ‘It’s been a bit too much for all of us,’ said Charlot…‘I think it would be such a good idea if we all crept away somewhere for a little holiday before the trial comes off or war breaks out and nobody can go anywhere…I don’t mean anywhere smart like Antibes or the Lido but some un-smart place…where we could bathe and blow away the horrors and have a tiny bit of mild gambling at night.’

  This is the fecklessness that Ngaio found so charming yet also reprehensible. She was not long back from a reckless trip with Nelly Rhodes to Monte Carlo, and the Rhodeses had survived another financial crisis while she was there. Ngaio could be puritanical about their work ethic and extravagance, but deep down the daughter of a mother who walked miles to save a tram fare could not help but be impressed. Love is not rational, and there is always hope for the next generation—as there is at the end of Surfeit of Lampreys, when Alleyn tells Nigel that ‘Henry’s been talking about a job’.

  ‘Good Lord! Not the little New Zealander[’s influence]?’

  ‘I think so.’ Alleyn grimaced. ‘I told you she was a courageous little party,’ he said.

  Surfeit of Lampreys was released in the United States in 1940, under the title Death of a Peer, and in Britain at the beginning
of 1941. Reviews on both sides of the Atlantic were glowing. ‘There is no doubt that Miss Ngaio Marsh is among the most brilliant of those authors who are transforming the detective story from a mere puzzle into a novel with many other qualities besides the challenge to our wits,’ wrote the critic for The Times Literary Supplement in January 1941. The reviewer for The Observer rated the novel as her best so far, describing it as a brilliantly readable drawing room detective story…[The h]igh spot is lavish, very cunning characterisation of vague, charming, dotty family of bankrupt peer.’ The Sunday Times called it ‘capital’: ‘gruesome crimes, light relief, sprightly characters, good plot, resolute and broad-minded detective’.

  A negative, but perhaps justified, criticism was made in the Sketch. Overall the reviewer endorsed the book, but ‘some of the Lampreys show a tiresome tendency to become stage characters, and there are moments when the sound of the raising curtain becomes almost audible’. Ngaio’s characters were occasionally stagy and affected, and sometimes her novel of manners became mannered. By making Roberta Grey a contemporary of the Lamprey children she slyly escaped any deep psychological analysis of her characters. Roberta is the book’s central consciousness and she is only 20 years old.

  Critics could see potential for Ngaio, both as pure novelist and as a writer for theatre. ‘Her strongest card is dialogue,’ wrote the critic for Punch; ‘when the theatre comes to life again after HITLER’S funeral it will be surprising if Miss MARSH does not make a new name for herself.’ On the other side of the world, and in spite of the war, that was what Ngaio was doing.

  In July 1941, she produced Outward Bound at the Little Theatre in Christchurch. Early that year a small delegation of Canterbury University students had ventured up to her house on Valley Road to ask her if she would produce their annual play. The title had already been selected so it was something of a fait accompli, but she agreed anyway, ‘for the hell of it’. She was hungry for young company and loved the idea of working with students bristling with intelligence and a raw, untapped energy. This was talent she could mould as she could the characters in her books. She brought all the resources she had to her production of Outward Bound. Evelyn Page’s husband, Frederick, wrote the music and she began to use her old friend Dundas Walker to give maturity to the acting. The good-natured, gaunt, sometimes cadaverous-looking Walker became a regular feature in her productions.

  The following year, for the Canterbury Repertory Society, she produced Harold Hobhouse’s one-Act play, Lonesome Life, and also Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit for the Canterbury and Wellington repertory companies. Theatre production used skills that had lain relatively dormant in her renaissance repertoire of talent, and provided a life richly textured with people, passion and intellect.

  Her own personal performances were confined largely to speeches and radio broadcasts. In 1940, she travelled to Wellington to be part of a gathering of writers in the Women’s Section of the Centennial Exhibition. While she was there she made recordings with the National Broadcasting Service (NBS), which included three travel talks, the story of the initiation of E.C. Bentley at the Detection Club dinner in 1937, and a reflection on detective fiction writing, which was published in the New Zealand Listener in August 1940.

  She would become a broadcasting celebrity. Her immaculately delivered, elegantly styled, thoughtful, rather romantic reflections on faraway places most New Zealanders only read about or saw on newsreels and in films were highly sought after. Her deep contralto voice was compelling and authoritative, and thousands listened in. Ngaio Marsh became a household name, not just because of her crime writing, but because of her vivid recollections of London and the Continent, now sealed off by war. Her talks were broadcast on 3YA in June and July of 1940, and again in January 1943. A delightfully apt Russell Clark cartoon of Detection Club writers, titled ‘Miss Marsh is Detected…’, was published in the Listener to advertise one of the broadcasts. ‘Miss Marsh called her talk “The Queerest Party”,’ the caption read.

  Ngaio’s radio talks were so successful that before Surfeit of Lampreys came out negotiations were in full swing to broadcast it, and the rights were secured. ‘Not only will this detective novel be broadcast simultaneously with publication,’ proclaimed the New Zealand Listener triumphantly, ‘but the author herself will be the broadcaster.’ Surfeit of Lampreys was played to 2YA listeners in February 1942, in a series of 20 readings, each about 20 minutes long.

  In December 1942, an elegant full-page portrait photograph of Ngaio graced the front page of the Listener. The caption underneath read: ‘a new series of talks for the NBS, and the producing of a Noel Coward play for the Wellington Repertory this week must make her one of the busiest women in New Zealand’. The production of Coward’s Blithe Spirit was ‘the reward I allowed myself for finishing my last detective story,’ Ngaio explained to the interviewer in an accompanying article. ‘I always give myself some sort of break before I start on the next.’ This was the gap between the publication of Death and the Dancing Footman in 1941 and Colour Scheme in 1943. During this period she had also written a book for ‘The British Commonwealth in Pictures’ series entitled New Zealand. Ngaio was astonishingly busy. She worked like a machine, and much of what she did, in her diverse fields, was remarkably clever.

  Ngaio felt her most recent writing was her best. ‘Death and the Dancing Footman is Miss Marsh’s favourite among her own books,’ the New Zealand Listener journalist told readers. It was published in the same year as Surfeit of Lampreys, yet it contained far less personal material. It was almost as if Ngaio were trying to create a plot that would give her perfect form.

  Death and the Dancing Footman was her most suspense-ridden murder to date, because almost all her cosy cast of characters have good reason to fear they may be the victim, and the murder does not occur until late in the book. In the first chapter, called ‘Project’, Jonathan Royal introduces his monstrous scheme for a weekend party at Highfold Manor in Dorset. He has orchestrated a real-life drama, that will be played out by people who hate each other, in front of poetic dramatist Aubrey Mandrake, who is the unwitting audience. Royal is producer-director, and Death and the Dancing Footman a foretaste of the nightmare of reality television. He hand-picks his guests on the basis of their acrimony. There is a German surgeon, along with the woman he mutilated in a botched facelift 20 years earlier; the woman’s sons, who hate each other; an ex-fiancé and her current lover; plus two bitter business rivals in the beauty business. The only person without an axe to grind (or in this case a Maori mere to swing, because this is the murder weapon) is their host, Jonathan Royal, and Aubrey Mandrake, whose darkest secret is that he changed his name by deed poll from Stanley Footling.

  It is beginning, thinks Jonathan Royal, who almost hugs himself with pleasure when Aubrey Mandrake arrives before the other guests, so he can outline his ugly plan. It seems to him, he explains, that:

  ‘given the limitations of an imposed stage, some of my acquaintances would at once begin to unfold an exciting drama…I would set my palette with human colours, and the picture would paint itself. I would summon my characters to the theatre of my own house, and the drama would unfold itself.’

  ‘Pirandello,’ Mandrake began, ‘has become quite—’

  ‘But this is not Pirandello,’ Jonathan interrupted in a great hurry. ‘No. In this instance we shall see not six characters in search of an author, but an author who has deliberately summoned seven characters to do his work for him.’

  Ngaio is playing with Pirandello’s idea, but the Existentialism has been removed and the conceit twisted so that what remains is the result of bringing together characters who despise each other. That catalyst for action in Royal’s human drama is hate. Pirandello’s ideas still held an appeal for Ngaio, and Death and the Dancing Footman was an opportunity to see them played out in a different way. She was fascinated by the role of director in controlling actors and characters, and, like Royal, she often played host.

  Selecting guests for d
inner parties at Marton Cottage became a familiar ritual as her involvement in theatre increased and her celebrity status grew. Ngaio loved giving parties and they became a phenomenon in Christchurch. They were meticulously planned, lavish events catered by housekeeper and cook Mrs Crawford (Crawsie), and on special occasions the table was waited on by the gardener, Crawsie’s husband Andy. It was a joke they all shared—a playing of roles, an aping of parts. ‘Dinner is served, Ma’am,’ Crawsie would announce in her plummiest voice. ‘Come on, dear.’ And Ngaio would smile wryly. On cue, the guests would file into a warm wood-panelled dining room and sit at a round table gorgeously laden with silver and crystal.

  Ngaio’s friends and colleagues remembered these as wonderful occasions. She was a generous host, and food, wine and whisky flowed freely. The laughter was riotous, and the talk animated and intelligent. Ngaio was a great facilitator. She fed but never dominated conversation. ‘She was a strong woman, but never overpowering.’ Ngaio read the nuances of her guests’ behaviour and anticipated their needs. Always, at the end of the meal the women retired, and the men would sit smoking and drinking double-fingered whiskies. Even though she was excluded, Ngaio was a stickler for Old World protocol.