Ngaio Marsh

• Born: April 23, 1895
• Birthplace: Christchurch, New Zealand
• Died: February 18, 1982
• Place of death: Christchurch, New Zealand

Types of Plot: Police procedural; thriller; cozy

Principal Series: Roderick Alleyn, 1934-1982

Contribution

Ngaio Marsh’s novels embody many of the traditions of the British Golden Age of detective fiction. Most critics include her among the grand dames: Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, and Margery Allingham. She enjoyed a writing career second only to Christie’s in longevity and productivity. She is separated from her colleagues by her New Zealand background and loyalties, which give her a different, “outsider’s,” view of the England about which she writes. She transcends many of the familiar limitations of detective fiction as she creates an aristocratic professional police officer who solves crimes committed in theaters, drawing rooms, and the New Zealand wilderness. Marsh writes with a uniquely well-honed ear for dialogue and how it reveals character. Her genius lies in her synthesis of three great traditions: detective fiction, character study, and the novel of manners.

Biography

Edith Ngaio Marsh’s life begins, appropriately enough, with a mystery. Though she was born April 23, 1895, in Christchurch, New Zealand, her father listed her natal year as 1899. This act generated confusion about which the author herself remains vague in her autobiography. She describes her father as an absentminded eccentric descended from commercially successful English stock. Her mother, Rose Elizabeth Seager Marsh, was a second-generation New Zealand pioneer. Though never financially comfortable, her parents provided their only child with an excellent secondary education at St. Margaret’s College, where one teacher instilled in her “an abiding passion for the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare.” This passion interrupted her subsequent education in art at the University of Canterbury when she was invited to join the Allan Wilkie Company to act in Shakespearean and modern drama. She spent two years learning her chosen craft under Wilkie’s tutelage and four more years as a writer, director, and producer of amateur theatricals in New Zealand.

In 1928, Marsh visited friends in England who persuaded her to open a small business in London. The business flourished, as did her writing. Inspired by either Dorothy L. Sayers or Agatha Christie (her memory contradicts itself), she began her first detective novel, which was published as A Man Lay Dead in 1934. Shortly thereafter, she returned to New Zealand and remained there through World War II, serving in the Ambulance Corps and writing twelve more mysteries by the end of the war. Perhaps her best among these books is Vintage Murder (1937), which incorporates many of her themes and settings.

After the war Marsh traveled extensively, maintained homes in both London and New Zealand, wrote more mysteries, and directed plays, primarily those of William Shakespeare, for the students of the University of Canterbury. Her contributions were honored by the university in 1962 when the Ngaio Marsh Theatre was opened on the campus. In 1966, the queen declared her a Dame of the British Empire. Other honors include the 1978 Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and induction into the Detection Club of Great Britain. On February 18, 1982, Dame Ngaio died in her home in Christchurch.

Analysis

In many ways, Ngaio Marsh’s mysteries follow the rules of detective fiction as prescribed by S. S. Van Dine in 1928. These rules emphasize the genre’s intellectual purity: the puzzle, the clues, and the solution. They insist on fairness for the reader: The author must not indulge himself with hidden clues, professional criminals, spies, or secret cults. No mere trickery should sully the game between the author and the reader. There is an implicit emphasis on the classical dramatic unities of time, place, and action. In A Man Lay Dead, her first novel, Marsh adheres to these strictures with spare character and place description, well-planted but subtle clues to the murderer’s motives and identity, and a quick solution. On the strength of this novel and the several that followed, one critic referred to her as “the finest writer in England of the pure, classical puzzle whodunit.” Yet to insist on her books as “pure” is misleading. By the time she had written three novels, she was challenging some of Van Dine’s most sacred tenets—not his doctrine of fairness and logical deduction but his demand for simplicity in all but plot. Her challenge succeeded in cementing her reputation as a novelist without sacrificing her commitment to detective fiction. She so successfully joined the elements of character and tone with the detective yarn that she provides a link between the older traditions of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins and the newer writings of Agatha Christie.

A Man Lay Dead

In her first six novels, Marsh introduced characters and settings to which she would return with more sophistication later. Her murders nearly always occur in some sort of theater in front of witnesses. Among the witnesses and suspects are her artistic characters, a few mysterious foreigners, the occasional fanatic, and usually one or two pairs of lovers. Their observations are shaped into the solution by Marsh’s detective, Roderick Alleyn, of Scotland Yard. It is his character that unites these disparate people and places. Marsh introduces Alleyn through the eyes of Angela North in A Man Lay Dead:

Alleyn did not resemble a plain-clothes policemen, she felt sure, nor was he in the romantic manner—white-faced and gimlet-eyed. He looked like one of her Uncle Hubert’s friends, the sort they knew would “do” for house-parties.

He is the younger son of a peer, educated at Oxford, courteous, but always somewhat detached. Alleyn’s fastidious nature, combined with his facetious wit, confuses those who expect either a foppish amateur or the plodding copper. Marsh aimed at creating a normal man whose personality never cloyed or bored his creator.

Alleyn also possesses a dry, almost peculiar sense of humor about his work. In Enter a Murderer (1935), he leaves headquarters remarking “Am I tidy? . . . It looks so bad not to be tidy for an arrest.” Earlier, he had described himself as feeling “self-conscious” about asking suspects for fingerprints. Despite Jessica Mann’s contention in Deadlier than the Male: Why Are Respectable English Women So Good at Murder? (1981) that Alleyn does not change or develop in the thirty-two novels, Marsh gradually introduces different aspects of his personality. In Artists in Crime (1938), Alleyn falls in love and is refused, though not absolutely, but in Death in a White Tie (1938), he has won the hand of Agatha Troy, a famous painter. By 1953, in Spinsters in Jeopardy, the couple has a son, Ricky. Troy and Ricky occasionally embroil Alleyn in mysteries that arise in the course of their careers or lives. Their presence assists Marsh in moving Alleyn into the murder scene. Amateurs might happen on crime with rather appalling frequency, but a professional police officer must be summoned.

Death in a White Tie

In Death in a White Tie, Alleyn’s character and pedigree are assured. This novel is pivotal in Marsh’s development of character description and social analysis. She quietly opens the drawing-room door onto the secrets, misery, and shallowness of those involved in “the season” in London. Lady Alleyn, the mother of the detective, and Agatha Troy attend the debutante parties, including a memorable one at which a popular older gentleman, Lord Robert, who is known by the improbable nickname “Bunchy” and the Dickensian last name, Gospell, is murdered. Murder is not the worst of it; blackmail, bastardy, adultery, bad debts, and many other ills beset these social darlings. As Bunchy himself ruminates,

he suddenly felt as if an intruder had thrust open all the windows of [his] neat little world and let in a flood of uncompromising light. In this cruel light he saw the people he liked best and they were changed and belittled. . . . This idea seemed abominable to Lord Robert and he felt old and lonely for the first time in his life.

Moments later, Bunchy is murdered. Alleyn, who was his friend, is called in to investigate.

During the investigation Marsh introduces him to some of her favorite types: the “simple soldier-man” who fought the war from the home front, the gauche American lady (whose venality drives her to accept payment for sponsoring an awkward debutante who is part Jewish), the quintessential cad who cheats at cards, and the callow youth rescued from his own obtuseness by his clever girl. These characters begin to emerge from the cardboard restrictions deemed appropriate for classical detective fiction. Marsh adds grace notes of humor, such as General Halcut-Hackett’s outburst: “’Some filthy bolshevistic fascist,’ shouted the General, having a good deal of difficulty with this strange collection of sibilants. He slightly dislodged his upper plate but impatiently champed it back into position.” Marsh’s ear for such verbal quirks as well as her eye for color and line truly set her apart from the conventions of detective-fiction characterizations. In praising Agatha Christie for her books, Marsh commented that Christie was at her best in plotting: “Her characters are two-dimensional. . . . To call them silhouettes is not to dispraise them.” Marsh described herself as trying “to write about characters in the round and [being] in danger of letting them take charge.” Although some critics charge that in Death of a Peer (1940), the Lamprey family and their peculiarities do overwhelm the mystery, she never loses the struggle with these lively, complicated folk—rather, she enriches the yarn, encouraging her readers to care more fully about who is innocent or guilty.

Overture to Death

In Overture to Death (1939), Marsh expands her repertoire of characters by developing a type that will reappear several times throughout her subsequent novels—the iron-willed, often sexually repressed never-married woman. Her two old maids, Eleanor Prentice and Idris Campanula, rival each other for domination of community good works and for the affections of the naïve rector. Eleanor, “thin, colorless . . . disseminated the odor of sanctity.” Her best friend and yet most deadly competitor, Idris, is described as a “large and arrogant spinster with a firm bust, a high-colored complexion, coarse gray hair, and enormous bony hands.” Throughout the novel, the tension between their artificial civility toward each another and their jaw-snapping, claw-sharpening ill will fuels the plot. Idris is the victim of a bizarre and deadly booby trap. She is shot, while playing the piano, by a pistol propped between the pegs where the piano wires were affixed. A loop of string tied around the trigger had been fastened to the soft-pedal batten, and pushing the pedal discharged the report into her face. As Alleyn discovers, Eleanor, driven to desperation by what she regarded as her rival’s ultimate success with the rector, cleverly utilized what had begun as a harmless joke set with a child’s water pistol for her own nefarious purpose. Such an involved means of murder is typical of Marsh’s imagination. In this novel and others, she murders her victims by grisly methods: decapitation, meat skewers through the eye, boiling mud, and suffocation in a wool press. Though Marsh never ceased to insist that she was squeamish, her sense of the dramatic demanded a dramatic dispatch of the victim.

Running throughout all Marsh’s novels is a wry sense of humor, often turned inward. Because she considered her life’s work to be in theater rather than in detective fiction, Marsh often parodied the conventions of detective novels in her own works. In her first novel, Alleyn comments, “Your crime books will have told you that under these conditions the gardens of the great are as an open book to us sleuths.” In Death in a White Tie, Marsh quotes part of the oath of the prestigious detection club when she has Lord Robert exclaim, “No jiggery-pokery.” Overture to Death finds a police sergeant lamenting that “these thrillers are ruining our criminal classes,” and in Vintage Murder, Alleyn remarks sarcastically, “so the detective books tell us, . . . and they ought to know.” In none of the works of the other grand dames of detective fiction is this self-mockery so pronounced, though Allingham and Sayers both professed, like Marsh, to be more seriously occupied in other pursuits. Marsh echoes Rebecca West’s statement: “There is this curious flight that so many intelligent women make into detective writing” in Black Beech and Honeydew: An Autobiography (1966, revised 1981). According to Marsh, “If I have any indigenous publicity value it is, I think for work in the theater rather than for detective fiction. . . . Intellectual New Zealand friends tactfully avoid all mention of my published work, and if they like me, do so, I cannot but feel, in spite of it.” Toward the end of her life, however, Marsh, in a revised edition of her autobiography, did acknowledge the benefits of her writing, for without its profits she could never have directed student theater and have indulged her passion for Shakespearean production.

Vintage Murder

No discussion of Marsh, her life, or her detective fiction can afford to ignore her loyalty to her native New Zealand and its influence on her fiction. Four of her novels take place in New Zealand, with the faithful Alleyn still in command. In each of these novels, the setting plays an important part in the mystery; indeed, the country becomes a character—lovingly and lyrically examined in Marsh’s prose. Certainly the most beautiful aspects of the country are discussed in Vintage Murder. This novel, an early one, contains many elements of what would become vintage Marsh: Alleyn, the theater, a bizarre murder, a cast of flamboyant actors, and the country. Though Marsh paints hauntingly stark portraits of rural England, nowhere does her painterly sense serve her so well as at home. New Zealand, Alleyn senses, is a new world, clean, light, immaculate; it purges the squalid and revitalizes the jaded. In the forest, he muses,

There was something primal and earthy about this endless interlacing of greens. It was dark in the bush, and cool, and the only sound there was the sound of trickling water, finding its way downhill to the creek. There was the smell of wet moss, of cold wet earth. . . . Suddenly, close at hand, the bird called again—a solitary call, startlingly like a bell.

The forest renews him, stimulates his senses and his imagination. Marsh weaves the love of her land and of her people—Maori and Paheka alike—into her novels with elegant prose and a colorful palette.

These are “Marshmarks” as one observer has noted: sound deductive logic to please the conventions of the detective story, colorful but willful characters skillfully endowed with dialogue that is as lively as thought, and a sense of atmosphere and place that is palpable. Each of these qualities transforms her novels from a clever puzzle into an analysis of character and manners.

Principal Series Character:

• Roderick Alleyn is a superintendent in the Central Intelligence Division. At the outset he is forty-two years old and single, then he marries Agatha Troy Alleyn and has one son, Ricky. Alleyn possesses an ironic wit that often runs to facetiousness. His preciosity is offset by his self-deprecating manner and his natural egalitarianism in a class-conscious society.

Bibliography

Acheson, Carole, and Carolyn Lidgard, eds. Return to Black Beech: Papers from a Centenary Symposium on Ngaio Marsh, 1895-1995, Christchurch, New Zealand, 1996. Christchurch, New Zealand: Centre for Continuing Education, University of Canterbury, 1996. Collection of ten papers on Marsh given at an academic conference celebrating her hundredth birthday. Bibliographic references

Acheson, Carole, and Carolyn Lidgard, eds. “Roderick Alleyn: Ngaio Marsh’s Oxonian Superintendent.” The Armchair Detective 11 (January, 1978): 63-71. Discussion of one of Marsh’s most famous characters, comparing him to other famous fictional detectives.

Boon, Kevin. Ngaio Marsh. Wellington, New Zealand: Kotuku, 1996. A native New Zealand study of Marsh’s life and work.

DuBose, Martha Hailey, with Margaret Caldwell Thomas. Women of Mystery: The Lives and Works of Notable Women Crime Novelists. New York: St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2000. Compares Marsh to five of her fellow female mystery novelists, examining her distinctive contribution to the genre.

Klein, Kathleen Gregory, ed. Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Places Marsh within a coherent lineage of female mystery writers, emphasizing her relationship to those preceding and following her.

Lewis, Margaret. Ngaio Marsh: A Life. Scottsdale, Ariz.: Poisoned Pen Press, 1998. Reprint edition of one of the more successful Marsh biographies.

Rahn, B. J., ed. Ngaio Marsh: The Woman and Her Work. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1995. Collection of essays by Marsh scholars examining various aspects of her fiction and experience. Bibliographic references.

Weinkauf, Mary S., and Mary A. Burgess. Murder Most Poetic: The Mystery Novels of Ngaio Marsh. San Bernardino, Calif.: Brownstone Books, 1996. A study of Marsh as a stylist, emphasizing the artistry of her writing and its contribution to the overall effects of her mysteries.