Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime (14 page)

That night the heat and humidity precipitated a massive thunderstorm. Everything rumbled as they sat up and listened. The next day Ngaio was up early to paint. She thought her work was insipid, but kept it as a reminder of an adventure that would otherwise seem ‘more like a dream’.

But the dream had a darker
doppelgänger.
At Wasserbillig they crossed the border into Nazi Germany. ‘Lots of people thought it was wonderful,’ she remembered. ‘Even the humblest tourist saw only the fine rooms in the Herrenvock house. The Bluebeard cupboards were kept tactfully locked.’ But not at Beilstein on the Mosel River, where they were delayed three weeks while Betty Cotterill recovered from pleurisy. If they had moved on they would have missed the dark side of this picturesque town.

‘Think of the nicest woodcut…in the oldest book you have ever seen,’ Ngaio wrote. Imagine a town with a castle, with houses with rooftops ‘crazily joined together’, ‘where hay is stored in the attic rooms & the cow lives in the basement’, and you have pictured Beilstein. The sound of singing and the hospitable clink of glasses lured them up twisting stairs to a wine garden owned by the widow Lippmann and her son. It was with the Lippmanns that they stayed. During the day the village emptied of all but the youngest children and crones, who would ‘lean out of their windows & screech amiably across the square’. At sunset, the able-bodied peasants returned from sweltering vineyards ‘dyed from head to foot, in cerulean blue’ from copper sulphate sprays.

It seemed an idyllic existence until they took a walk in hills behind the castle, and discovered a carefully concealed Jewish graveyard. ‘The headstones bore the symbol of interwoven triangles & carried among them most of the familiar village names.’ Nearly 100 years before, a vine-growing nobleman had introduced Jewish workers to the district and they had settled and inter-married. Almost everyone was touched by this legacy, especially Frau and Herr Koppel, ‘an old couple, the man disabled, who bore very clearly the physical signs of their mixed ancestry. They were terribly poor & eked out a livelihood by selling sweets & screws of tobacco & faded postcards in their room on the market square.’
The sound of jackboots on Beilstein’s cobblestones heralded a new era. While Ngaio sat on the castle battlements writing letters, she watched three Gestapo arrive by river raft. Disturbed by what she saw, she joined her friends in their room overlooking the square. ‘All over the little town there was the sound of slamming doors. Followed by complete silence’, and then the sound of Gestapo boots as they went around the houses. Before departing they pinned up a notice in the square. That evening a bell was rung to gather townspeople in the square. Leaflets were distributed and the mayor read a proclamation.

‘The people of the town were warned that they would no longer be considered true Nordic citizens if they continued to patronize the tiny shop kept by the old couple…or communicate with them in any way.’ Ngaio saw the Koppels once more a few nights later. It was stiflingly hot, the early hours of the morning, and she was awake and restless. She got up and went to the window that looked over the square. In the moonlight she caught sight of something unexpected. It was the old woman standing ‘stock-still’. ‘Her hands were folded in a shawl, her heavy face up turned to the light. She had dared to come out for a moment.’ Beyond her in deeper shadow was her husband. ‘I felt myself an intruder & I drew away from the window. But I couldn’t help listening.’ For a long time there was silence, then the faint tinkle of a shop bell. They had gone indoors—they would be gone for good. The scene was ominous, and Ngaio knew it. ‘It seemed to me that the little town was threatened with madness, that a great surge of lethal insanity was rolling up the Mosel like a tidal wave & that these peasants with their little dram of Jewish blood were doomed.’

Ngaio wrote when she could during the day and late at night. She sat out on the battlements or in the Lippmanns’ terraced garden among carnations and ‘night-scented stocks’ and worked on
Death in a White Tie.
They savoured the delights of the wine cellar. They paddled and swam in the Mosel River and collected strawberries from the nearby woods, where one afternoon they met a young New Zealander who proclaimed the wonders of Nazi Germany. But all the time there were signs that something heinous was happening. Ngaio saw a group of small schoolboys on holiday with their teacher. All day he drilled them. ‘
They even bathed to orders
bobbing up & down in routine & morning & evening they recited a sort of creed ending with their drawn out cry—“Heil Hitler”.’ A vitriolic denunciation of the Jews was nailed to cottage doors in Beilstein. The people were frightened, and their fear was infectious. As soon as Betty Cotterill was well, the New Zealanders left.

Their ‘journey through 6 realms’ would take them ‘from London to Vienna’, but sadly the rest of their itinerary was unrecorded. Ngaio met up with Nelly Rhodes in October and they holidayed in Monte Carlo. Unlike the publicly documented road trip, this was a private meeting of close friends. During her 1937-38 English visit, Ngaio spent a considerable amount of time with the Rhodes family. She stayed with them for a while in an old schoolhouse, and at country residences. It is likely Ngaio was with Nelly when she toured Devon and Cornwall in early 1938, and stayed in the fishing village of Polperro on the Cornish coast. Ngaio developed a great affection for the Rhodes children, who were getting older and more interesting, and during this visit she illustrated ‘Over the Edge of the Earth’, a children’s story written by Eileen, the eldest Rhodes daughter. The slightly stiff pen-and-ink illustrations have a redeeming, surreal quality that is intriguing. Unfortunately, the enthusiastically conceived joint project was never published.

In 1938, Ngaio had the thrill of seeing a pair of titles published that represented the fruition of nearly two years’ hard work.
Artists in Crime
and
Death in a White Tie
were well received by British and American critics. There was a sense that her stature had not yet been fully recognized.
‘Miss Marsh is a novelist of variety as well as an expert craftsman of crime,’
wrote the critic for
Punch
in February 1938. ‘She deserves to be much better known.’ There was an appreciation, too, of her ingenuity and sheer brilliance at evoking a grisly scene. The critic for the
Church Times
described the second murder in
Artists in Crime,
as ‘probably the best bit of crime writing of the year’, and, in the opinion of
The Observer,
Ngaio Marsh specialized in ‘cunning and novel modes of inflicting death’ and had a ‘bold and happy gift of portraiture’.

The reception of
Death in a White Tie
a little later in the year was equally enthusiastic, although, as Edmund Cork had predicted, there were mixed responses to the introduction of Alleyn’s love interest.
‘Death in a White Tie
is the best type of detective story and well up to Miss Marsh’s previous high standards,’ wrote the reviewer for
The Times Literary Supplement,
in September.

[It] has only one serious defect. The chief inspector is made to pursue his love affair…It would be a pity if the example set by Miss Sayers with Lord Peter Wimsey of entangling her detective of seemingly settled and delightful bachelor habits in a serious-minded love affair were to be regularly followed
by all writers of detective stories…romance is not Miss Marsh’s metier, and some of the dialogue leaves one a bit hot under the collar. It is hoped, with all due respect to Miss Sayers, that when Alleyn is next confronted with a corpse it will not be in the course of his honeymoon.

For many enthusiasts, and even crime fiction reviewers, the introduction of a series wife to partner a series detective was corrosive of conventions designed to secure the purity of the puzzle.

Although this thinking was laced with implicit misogyny, it was not an exclusively male argument. Agatha Christie found love
‘a terrible bore in detective stories’
and felt that it belonged more appropriately in romance stories. ‘To force a love motif into what should be a scientific process went much against the grain.’

Christie was safe in making these assertions because her detectives were not obviously marriageable material: a heart-stopping romance was not expected of Poirot or Miss Marple. Wimsey, Campion and Alleyn, on the other hand, were youngish, red-blooded males with assumed sexual needs. As Jessica Mann points out, ‘
a series hero
who is allowed to mature in other ways must either prove to be a selfish bastard’—like James Bond who played the field—‘[or] fix his affection on one particular girl and…marry her’. Without some degree of sexual and emotional development, these detectives would be stunted. Series romance and marriage fitted also with their authors’ shared aspiration to raise the detective novel above the level of a puzzle plot. If their sleuths were to become more psychologically complex, they needed a third dimension—an emotional life.

Harriet Vane had simmered away as a potential long-term liaison for Lord Peter Wimsey since her trial for the murder of former lover, Philip Boyes, in
Strong Poison
in 1930. Wimsey is transfixed at their first meeting. She will face the hangman’s noose if he does not find the real killer. Vane and Boyes have been living together as lovers. Boyes has been an opponent of marriage, so when he turns around a year later and proposes, she is angered by his hypocrisy and leaves. When he is found dead from arsenic poisoning, Vane has both motive and method because she is a crime writer researching this very subject for a new book. All the clues point to her. Certainly Sayers drew on her own life when she created Vane. Like Sayers, Vane is a first-generation woman graduate from Oxford. At heart she is an intellectual attracted, like Sayers, to academia.
Vane’s relationship with bohemian-scrupled Boyes is like that of Sayers with John Cournos, and with Bill White. Like her creator, Vane lives in a bedsit in Mecklenburgh Square, Bloomsbury, socializes with artists and writers, and makes an independent living from her crime fiction writing. She has similar experiences as a writer, and holds similar views. Vane refuses Wimsey’s proposal, even after she is acquitted of murder on his evidence. Gratitude, she believes, is no basis for marriage. Like Agatha Troy, Vane is reluctant to give up her freedom, and she finds Wimsey shallow and overbearing. Wimsey pursues his sweetheart, finally marrying her in
Busman’s Honeymoon
in 1937.

In keeping with the swashbuckling flavour of her writing, Margery Allingham’s love interest for Campion is adventurous—the Amelia Earhart-style Amanda Fitton. Campion first meets her, aged 17, in
Sweet Danger
in 1933. Her parents are dead and she lives in the crumbling mansion of Pontisbright Mill in Suffolk, with her brother and sister. They are poor, and to make ends meet the ingenious Amanda works out a way of powering an electric car from a local watermill. This is an aphrodisiac for Campion, who has been called in to establish the ownership of Averna, a tiny oil-rich principality on the Adriatic. The Fittons are claimants, and Campion is charged with protecting them from thugs hired by an unscrupulous developer. At the end of the novel, Amanda asks Campion to take her into partnership and hints that ‘in about six years’ time she may be ready to marry. In
The Fashion in Shrouds,
published in 1937, Amanda reappears as an aircraft engineer. To distract attention from an awkward investigative moment, she announces her engagement to Campion. The super-sleuth is shocked, but warms to the idea. After a party to celebrate the breaking-off of their fake engagement, the jilted Campion argues with Amanda and throws her in the river. Somehow she manages to see this as a demonstration of his affection and at end of the novel they become properly engaged.

These romantic liaisons in detective fiction prove to be ideal marriages, the sort the writers would have wanted for themselves. They are pairings of equality, where a super-sleuth’s match is an equally capable wife, who makes no career compromises. Amanda Campion’s work takes precedence over housekeeping, and Peter Wimsey is emphatic that Harriet’s writing is not to be interrupted by domestic trivia. Within the conventional institution of marriage, the Queens of Crime tackled a tricky modern problem that did not necessarily reflect the views of the status quo. Women’s equality in the workplace and at home was not a social assumption like the hierarchies of class, culture and religion. For many it
was controversial. The Queens were not flagrant feminists or subversives, yet it was revolutionary in a genre that was assumed to reflect society’s established mores, to portray a marriage of equality as the norm.

In
Overture to Death,
published in 1939, but inspired by Ngaio’s experiences in 1938, Alleyn writes a letter to Troy, committing himself to a modern marriage. In it he admits that his profession makes him ‘a chancey sort of lover…A fly-by-night who speaks to you at nine o’clock on Saturday evening, and soon after midnight is down in Dorset looking at lethal pianos.’ He makes a pledge:

My dear and my darling Troy, you shall disappear, too, when you choose, into the austerity of your work, and never, never, never shall I look sideways, or disagreeably, or in the manner of the martyred spouse. Not as easy a promise as you think, but I make it.

While Wimsey, Campion, and Alleyn were either engaged or honeymooning, Hercule Poirot was safely single and holidaying aboard a paddle steamer on the Nile.

In 1937, Agatha Christie was in the Middle East with her husband Max Mallowan, who was leading an archaeological expedition to Tell Brak in Syria. Christie photographed and recorded finds at the site, and during her spare time began
Death on the Nile,
a novel set in Egypt where they took a break. She uses love mixed with greed as the motive for her crime. Simon Doyle and his rich heiress wife, Linnet, are on a luckless honeymoon, tracked down and stalked relentlessly by the thwarted Jacqueline de Bellefort, Simon’s former fiancée and Linnet’s former best friend. Linnet is eventually found shot through the head, with the letter ‘J’ drawn in blood on the wall to incriminate Jacqueline. Christie uses this romantic triangle to generate one of her cleverest plots. The novel was one of her favourites, and certainly, she thought, one of her best ‘foreign travel’ books.