Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime (2 page)

Because public pressure foiled Conan Doyle’s attempt in 1893 to kill off Sherlock Holmes by pushing him and his nemesis Professor Moriarty over a waterfall, the sleuth lived much longer than his creator ever intended. In fact, the short-story form was in decline by 1927 when
The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes
brought this famous career to an end. Conan Doyle’s influence was immense, as was the part he played in a British-based literary lineage that included G. K. Chesterton, Edgar Wallace and others. In what could have been wasteland years between the two World Wars, the genre flourished, and, remarkably, the chief architects of this classical era of detective fiction were women.

On the surface the four Queens of Crime, as they became known, seemed to be conventional upper-class women with values rooted in the ‘smiling and beautiful countryside’ and lives untouched by their fetish subject, murder. But the conventions of the whodunit offered these very private women a perfect cover. When Agatha Christie introduced Hercule Poirot in
The Mysterious Affair of Styles
in 1920, she invested in the book little more of her private life than the knowledge of poisons she had gleaned from war work behind a hospital pharmacy counter in Torquay. There was even less of her in the wax-trimmed moustache-wearing, stout little Belgian with the egg-shaped head who became her dandified detective through 33 novels and 10 collections of short stories over more than 55 years. Death came easily to Agatha Christie, and Hercule Poirot irritated her intensely. She would have killed him off earlier, but he was the heir to Sherlock Holmes, a small man who became a superman in the public’s imagination.

Hercule Poirot may sometimes have hovered perilously between cardboard cut-out and eccentric Holmesian cliché, but Christie transcended his weaknesses by constructing fabulously intricate problem plots. She was mathematical in her plotting, but also deceptive, and her killer instinct left no one exempt. In
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,
which catapulted her into prominence in 1926,
she treacherously breached detective etiquette by making the trusted narrator the murderer. This violation only enhanced her profile, beginning her reign as one of the world’s greatest detective writers. Interestingly, her stories were local and almost over-brewed in their Englishness. They were set typically in rural English villages, like the fictional St Mary Mead, the home of Christie’s other iconic sleuth, Miss Jane Marple. This was a world at risk from the emerging economies of the 20th century, but in the 1920s and 1930s a habitat still existed for the country squire, his family, servants and forelock-tugging gardeners and tradesmen. This was where the privileged Christie lived, and it was familiar to, or at least a desirable fantasy for, many of her readers. Miss Marple made her appearance in the midst of this cosy ordinariness, knitting and gossiping her way through the solution to her first
Murder at the Vicarage
in 1930. This elderly, mystery-solving spinster began as a bloodless archaism, severe, blue-eyed, frail and wearing a black lace cap and mittens, but she would update herself through 12 novels, becoming, warmer, wittier and more human. No other author has given so much snooping talent to a female figure of such advanced years, and created such a charismatic character.

Agatha Christie’s writing followed the strict detective novel formula, with a tightly structured beginning, a middle that explored the possibilities of the plot, and an end that neatly tied everything up. This rigid form gave her absolute control. But in 1926 her own life was less conveniently scripted. In the wake of her much-loved mother’s death and her dashing military husband’s elopement with one of her acquaintances, she disappeared. Her car was found mysteriously abandoned in a chalk pit. She would be discovered 10 days later, at a Harrogate spa, checked into the hotel under the surname of her husband’s mistress, Nancy Neele. The English press at the time accused her of orchestrating the event to promote sales of
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,
her first book published by Collins. Although she began a new life with archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan, whom she married in 1930, the events surrounding her separation and divorce from Archibald Christie remained a mystery. Her autobiography describes the incident in terms of a mental breakdown or fugue, which seems a likely explanation for the disappearance of the intensely publicity-shy author. But publicity it did generate. The civilian response to police calls to mount a nationwide manhunt was almost unprecedented. Among the hundreds who searched for Agatha Christie was a young woman called Dorothy Sayers.

In 1923,
Whose Body?
introduced Sayers’ foppish, monocle-wearing Lord
Peter Wimsey. Operating as an amateur detective with friendly Inspector Charles Parker of Scotland Yard and manservant Bunter, Wimsey would work out whodunit and how in 11 novels and 21 short stories. There was much of Dorothy Sayers in the make-up, or rather make-believe, of her detective, and this is probably why she fell so famously in love with him. He was a projection of her fantasies. Wimsey was hugely rich and it gave her pleasure to spend his money for him. ‘
When I was dissatisfied
with my single unfurnished room, I took a luxurious flat for him in Piccadilly,’ she wrote in 1936. ‘When my cheap rug got a hole in it, I ordered him an Aubusson carpet. When I had no money to pay my bus fare I presented him with a Daimler Double Six…and when I felt dull I let him drive it.’

Wimsey began almost as a figure of farce, a caricature in his snobbish, over-mannered elegance, but he would evolve into an admirable man. He and Bunter were inspired in part by humorist and writer P.G. Wodehouse’s bungling Bertie Wooster and gentleman’s gentleman, Jeeves. But Sayers put existing models of the detective under a magnifying glass. Where his predecessors were mostly upper-class gentlemen, Wimsey was a blue-blooded aristocrat, the second son of the 15th Duke of Denver. He was educated at Eton, taking his degree, as Sayers had, at Oxford, where he received a First in history. His breeding was impeccable and his eccentricities refined to a high art. He was a talented musician, a collector of ancient books, and a connoisseur of fine wines, food, fashion and fast cars. Even his athletic prowess was consummate. At university he played cricket for Oxford, and when in sleuthing mode he dangled effortlessly from ropes off buildings. Only in visualizing his appearance did Sayers show restraint. Perhaps he could be called nondescript with his tow-coloured hair, beak-like nose and modest stature.

Wimsey’s life was vastly different from that of his creator. Dorothy Sayers’ first two detective novels were written during a difficult period. In 1921 she became infatuated with writer-journalist John Cournos, a man not prepared to return her love. She rebounded into an even less appropriate match with motorcar enthusiast Bill White, who, after a brief fling, left her pregnant and unmarried. Although she was a modern woman earning her living as a copywriter for Benson’s Advertising Agency, she was also a conservative and ultimately devout High Church Anglican. She was the only child of older parents. Her father had been the chaplain of Christ Church, Oxford, and headmaster of the choir school. She felt unable to tell her parents, in their 70s, about the arrival of their grandson,
John Anthony, in 1924. As a result she kept the baby secret, fostering him with her cousin Ivy Shrimpton. Her relationships with Cournos and White were never made public, and neither was the fact that she had an illegitimate son. Even when she wed older Fleet Street journalist Mac Fleming in 1926, she lived a double life divided between her flat in London and country home in Witham. Mac, who left paid work because of illness soon after they married, was part of her provincial life and many of her London friends never knew he existed.

Unlike Agatha Christie, Sayers created her sleuth to pay the bills, and the same was true for another of the reigning Queens of Crime, Margery Allingham. Younger than her two co-rulers, and something of a prodigy, she came from a working literary family of writer-journalists and editors. She was eight when her first story was published in her aunt’s magazine; her first novel,
Blackkerchief Dick,
came out in 1923 when she was 19.
The White Cottage Mystery,
her first story with a detective theme, was serialized in the
Daily Express
before it was produced as a novel in 1927, but it was not until
The Crime at Black Dudley
was published in 1929 that she had her first real success. It was in this book that she introduced her enigmatic Albert Campion. He began as a relatively minor figure, but when he captured the imagination and endorsement of her American publishers he was duly plucked from the chorus to become a star. There is more than a whiff of Wimsey and Wooster in Campion’s demeanour, and he may have been created as a spoof of the archetypal silly-ass sleuth. His pedigree was the most illustrious yet, because of his connection to royalty, although his exact relationship to the throne was never made specific. In fact, very little about this slippery snoop’s identity was specific. He had an assumed name, and there were other aliases. He was even physically ambiguous. His voice was described as idiotic and effete. A wiry albino-blond with buckteeth, he wore horn-rimmed spectacles and had a blank, unintelligent stare, but he was also heralded as a woman magnet.

Campion began as a modish young man-about-town with no serious intentions, but this was a smokescreen. In reality he moved easily between nobility and the criminal underworld to solve his crimes. Although a freelance government agent, and therefore seemingly on the right side of the law, his underworld connections were as close as his lugubrious valet, Magersfontein Lugg, who appeared first in
Mystery Mile,
in 1930. Lugg was a reformed cat burglar and borstal jail-bird, with a rich cockney accent and amusing turn of phrase. He would become the absent-minded Campion’s minder and nanny.
Allingham wrote another 17 novels and 20 short stories with Campion as her hero-sleuth. Like Wimsey, he developed into a more complex and compelling figure as the novels progressed. Her plots improved along with her characters, but their strength remained in the element of risk rather than the intellectual puzzle plot. She created tension by evoking a sense of fear and foreboding that could be as disturbing as violence. Witchcraft and the occult were the themes in a number of plots. Her own connections to spiritualism began in her youth when she said
Blackkerchief Dick
was communicated to her at a séance. In her later years she was drawn to religion, studying sorcery and black magic with an interest intensified by the occult’s long history in her local area.

Margery Allingham hoped she might make a career for herself on the stage. In 1920, she began an acting course at London’s Regent Street Polytechnic. Speech therapy and drama classes cured her childhood stutter, but acting was not the profession for this shy woman who found speaking in public an ordeal. The theatre remained a lifelong passion, and introduced her to Philip Youngman Carter. The pair had their first date at The Old Vic theatre in London. Together they attended countless stage productions, became secretly engaged in 1922, and married in 1928. A love of the theatre linked all the Queens of Crime, but none loved it more than Ngaio Marsh, the last to join this criminal quartet. She may well have sat in the same West End productions as Margery Allingham, but this was not all they shared. Allingham’s
The Crime at Black Dudley
bears the closest fingerprint to Ngaio Marsh’s
A Man Lay Dead.
Before she began her murderous weekend’s writing, Ngaio had been reading a detective novel from the local lending library. Later she remembered that it may have been an Agatha Christie or a Dorothy Sayers, but it was probably the residue of Margery Allingham’s plot that stayed in her mind as she wrote.

In
The Crime at Black Dudley,
a homicide explodes the gaiety of a weekend party in a musty-dusty manor house in remote coastal Suffolk. After dinner, a bejewelled 15th-century Italian dagger is used in a ritual game that has ancient associations with the house. In a blackened room, the blade is passed between guests in a frenzied rite that combines the anxiety of a pass-the-parcel bomb with the sensory deprivation of blind-man’s-buff. When light is restored, the host’s invalid uncle, Colonel Coombe, is found murdered and an important document is missing from his papers; the house guests are held hostage by a criminal gang seeking the document’s return. It is pathologist Dr George Abbershaw who uncovers the killer, assisted by the mysterious Albert Campion. Abbershaw was
almost certainly intended to be Allingham’s detective, but he was upstaged by the super-sleuth-spoof, Campion.

Although Ngaio and Allingham have similar plots, their execution is quite different. With each sinister ingredient, Allingham twists the tension of her story tighter. Her mansion is a rotting labyrinth of antique rooms and corridors connected by an ancient network of rat-infested secret passageways. Guests vanish through panelled walls, reappear behind fireplaces and are beaten up by Teutonic henchmen. Her host is a mask-wearing criminal mastermind, and his staff and associates some of Europe’s most villainous thugs. The situation becomes combustible and burn the house nearly does, with the guests locked in an upper chamber. Salvation comes when their desperate choruses of ‘view-halloo’ attract the Monewdon Hunt. Ngaio’s treatment, by comparison, is blander but more believable. Her suspense hinges on whodunit and how. Already her special talent for visualizing scenes is evident, as is her superb sense of dramatic timing.

In years to come Ngaio Marsh would cringe at the thought of her first novel, with its barely plausible storyline, shallow characterization and confined setting, but it was her entrée to crime fiction writing. In fact, both
A Man Lay Dead
and
The Crime at Black Dudley
exemplify the cosy detective novel form perfectly. Claustrophobic in every way, they unfold with a small group of characters, in a single main setting, over a short period of time. The exclusion of the outside world allows the writer to create a controlled environment where clues, red herrings, victims, innocents and villains can be paraded before the reader free of contamination. There can be no loose ends and no escapes. The isolated manor house is a favourite setting, but equally it could be a village, a train, a boat, a hospital, a theatre, or any discrete space that brings a hand-picked group of eccentrics together and locks the door. The cosy comes with a property box of stock characters. There is the prominent family with its multiple tensions, the vamp, the vicar, the rake, the student, the professor, the spinster, the young poseur, the doctor, the adventurer, the foreigner, the writer, the untouched young woman, and, of course, the murderer. For murder it mostly is, because the participants play for the highest stakes: the death penalty. Cosy plots are convoluted, so the reader is presented with a multiplicity of possible scenarios, each stopping at a dead end until the detective leads the way. The detective enters this amphitheatre of anxiety in a sanctified role to restore the balance of good over evil. He or she is neither judge nor executioner but high priest of order, exposing the wrongdoer, who is sacrificed to reaffirm society’s rules.
In 1942, writer and critic Nicholas Blake described the detective as ‘
the Fairy Godmother
of the twentieth century folk-myth’.
Certainly this figure played a magical part in one of the century’s favourite bedtime stories.