Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime (15 page)

Death on the Nile
was well received by critics, some of whom were rapturous. ‘
She has excelled herself
,’ wrote the critic for the
Evening News,
‘…must call for unqualified praise.’ Even
The Times
reviewer admired the complexity: ‘Must be read twice, once for enjoyment and once to see how the wheels go round.’ Agatha Christie was at a peak.

Hercule Poirot remains untouched, however. He never faces the complications of sharing his life with anyone and never changes to accommodate it. Christie
puts romance at the heart of her plot, but not in the heart of her sleuth. To her, the novel of social manners was another genre. The most she expected of her principal characters was that they seemed ‘real and alive’, and this is what she felt she had done with aplomb in
Death on the Nile.
She also cleverly evoked the Middle East. Christie shared Ngaio’s passion for travel and her most interesting settings were taken from her real-life experiences. ‘To Sybil Burnett who also loves wandering the world’ she wrote in the dedication to
Death on the Nile.

Writing was a portable occupation that an upper-middle-class wife could do while she accompanied her husband. Remarkably, Christie always saw Mallowan’s profession as an archaeologist as more important than her own as a writer. She was openly mercenary about what she did: she wrote now to make money. Mallowan’s archaeological digs were expensive and at times financed from their own pockets. But she believed that her role as a wife was her principal occupation. Perhaps this is why she never floated Hercule Poirot’s paddle steamer with anything more than murder.

For Ngaio, the English country village had some of the same sense of strangeness that the Nile had for Christie.
Overture to Death
came out of her time with Nelly Rhodes in the wintry south of England. ‘The upland air was cold after the stuffiness of the car. It smelt of dead leaves and frost.’ Alleyn notes the physical presence of winter as he steps out of the car in the Vale-of-Pen-Cuckoo, just as Ngaio would have noticed it at the tail end of her 1937-38 trip.

He has been called in to investigate a most unlikely murder, which has occurred at a Pen-Cuckoo fund-raising performance of a well-known West End play. The greying Idris Campanula is called upon at the last moment to stand in as pianist for her aging rival for the vicar’s affection, Eleanor Prentice, who is distraught. The victorious Campanula sits down at the keyboard to begin her
pièce de r
é
sistance,
Rachmaninoff’s ‘Prelude in C.’ She holds her bony left hand in the air. Then down it comes. ‘Pom.
Pom.
POM. The three familiar pretentious chords.’ Then she puts her left foot on the soft pedal, and it happens.

The air was blown into splinters of atrocious clamour. For a second nothing existed but noise—hard racketing noise. The hall, suddenly thick with dust, was also thick with a cloud of intolerable sound. And, as the dust fell, so the
pandemonium abated and separated into recognisable sources. Women were screaming. Chair legs scraped…the piano hummed like a gigantic top.

Miss Campanula slumps forward and her face slides down the sheet of music. She has been shot between the eyes by a ‘Heath-Robinson-style-gadget’ rigged inside the piano. It is a childish prank of village bad-boy Georgie Biggins, who has set up an ingenious system of strings and pulleys to fire a water pistol at one of the unsuspecting spinsters. But the murderer has exchanged the child’s water pistol for a Colt 32.

The tension that holds this English cosy together is ‘jealousy rooted in sex’. Eleanor Prentice is a thin, bloodless, bucktoothed woman of about 49. Idris Campanula, her buxom foe, is a large-framed, hot-flushed, wire-haired woman of equal antiquity. One is sanctimonious, the other arrogant, and they are rampant for the vicar, who holds them at bay with holy conversation which, on one horrible occasion, in a private moment with Idris Campanula, abandons him completely. As the vicar explains to Alleyn, she misunderstands his silence.

The next moment she was, to be frank, in my arms. It was without any exception the most awful thing that has ever happened to me. She was sobbing and laughing at the same time. I was in agony. I couldn’t release myself.

Ngaio knew exactly how awkward that experience could be because she’d had it in the headmistress’s office at St Margaret’s. ‘It’s beastly for you,’ says Alleyn, ‘but I’m sure you should tell me’, and he is right, because this is the trigger for the murder. It is Ngaio’s vivid picture of the sexual tension between two spinsters that gives this novel its bittersweet pull. Although they are caricatures in their grotesqueness, dependent on readers’ internalized misogyny and fear of aging, they are recognizable people. The stalking spinster is easily visualized in Dinah’s words of warning to her young fiancé, Henry. ‘She creeps and creeps, and she’s simply brimful of poison. She’ll drop some of it into our cup of happiness if she can.’

The critics loved it. ‘
Although I would have considerable difficulty
in pronouncing Miss Ngaio Marsh’s first name,’ wrote the reviewer for the
Daily Mail, ‘I
have no difficulty at all in pronouncing her
Overture to Death
a first-rate murder novel thoroughly justifying its selection by the Crime Club.’ The critic
for the
Irish Independent,
writing in June 1939, was equally ecstatic. ‘Ingenuity is only one of the author’s assets.’

She draws very clearly the characters of the half-dozen members of the village ‘upper ten’ who are suspects of the murder. She describes the procedure of police investigation as authentically as if she had served for years in the detective branch of a police force. Above all, she seems a natural storyteller with a gift for concise and dramatic writing. The hall mark of first class is stamped large over this book.

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.