Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime (32 page)

What disturbed Orwell was his detection of a new kind of killing. The Cleft Chin Murder, for instance, was a case where two people randomly thrown together maimed and murdered unknown people for no particular reason. ‘
The background was not
domesticity, but the anonymous life of…dance-halls, movie-palaces, cheap perfume, false names and stolen cars.’ How could this be memorable or pleasurable for a patriarch to read about? This was the kind of
hard-boiled detective fiction that writers had been contemplating since the mid-1920s, a sub-genre that took the ambiguities and random violence of working-class street life and made stories that did not fit the tidy patterns of the Golden Age. It began with the work of Carroll John Daly and was refined in the writing of Raymond Chandler who, with Dashiell Hammett, became one of the great exponents of the American school. Philip Marlowe, Chandler’s tough-talking, street-wise, stunt-pulling private eye, with the hint of a sensitive side, was the antithesis of the aristocratic super-sleuth. Chandler’s commentaries on detective fiction such as ‘The simple art of murder’ (1944) were in part an advocacy of his own style, which he saw as more relevant to modern life.

Collins’s Crime Club list had been dominated by the greats of the Golden Age, and a revolution, especially from Ngaio, was out of the question, but the old clichés would not stand and the challenge was to inject freshness into an iconic form. The story needed to be classic, but not rigid. So Ngaio began cogitating a fishy tale fit for Collins’s ‘silver-wedding’, as the
New Statesman
called it. She had
Scales of Justice
half finished when she received an invitation from her friend Essie Malone to join her in a trip to England on a Norwegian wool freighter called the
Temeraire,
out of Adelaide and bound for the Russian harbour town of Odessa. Ngaio had been thinking of going away, and she liked the novelty of this unconventional mode of transport because, apart from Essie Malone and her, there were only 10 other passengers. In total there were 63 on board, including the crew. There was only a small passengers’ common room with a bit of deck outside, a small games deck, and a narrow promenade. Their only other outdoor accommodation apart from this was hatch covers, on which they lay or sat.

This mixture of isolation and an odd degree of intimacy appealed to Ngaio. ‘
As soon as we were shown
our cabins I knew I would like the
Temeraire.
She was old-fashioned, odd and good.’ Ngaio enjoyed the soft-hearted Norwegian captain, who cried when he made birthday speeches and toasts to the English Queen. The people onboard and the ship itself became the material for
Singing in the Shrouds.
The concept of a few passengers travelling for weeks on a cargo vessel with a killer must have occurred to her as she moved around the ship or sat sunning herself on a hatch cover. She would brew the idea, but in the meantime she worked on her current novel. ‘
Essie had agreed
to act as secretary for the duration,’ she wrote in
Black Beech,
‘and we used often to work in the evenings at my current book:
Scales of Justice.’

Ngaio was especially keen to see Odessa. She had arranged for a special visa and was looking forward to seeing the opera house. In the few years she had been back in Christchurch since her Commonwealth tour she had become increasingly involved with two Estonian immigrants, Vladimir or Val Muling and his wife, Anita. This was a ‘new friendship-of-three’ that rapidly assumed a great significance. They had talked animatedly into the early hours of Russia and its culture, and in Odessa Ngaio hoped to bring these conversations to life.

Instead, the
Temeraire
sailed into an Iron Curtain that had been made chillier by the Cold War. The ship and its passengers were searched and searched again. Ngaio was instructed to stay in her cabin to await customs officials. She was anxious for herself and the other passengers, and there was the book. It had been typed in triplicate. Would it be seized? Should she hide it? When the officers arrived, the experience was less sinister than she had anticipated, but while they were at anchor in the port they were never allowed to leave the ship. It was frustrating. For 12 days the
Temeraire
unloaded wool, and all she saw of the Great Russian Bear was a few bedraggled soldiers guarding the wharf. The passengers were flooded with relief when an official put their passports on the table and the ship was free to go.

They continued on to Spain, and then to a port in Wales where Bob Stead met them and drove them to London. Ngaio took a ‘minute but beguiling house in Hans Road’, three streets over from Beauchamp Place, off Brompton Road. This was her Knightsbridge neighbourhood again, and she adored it. She shopped for her groceries at Harrod’s, saw Shakespearian plays at Stratford-upon-Avon and West End theatre, caught up with old friends like Pamela Mann and the younger generation of Rhodeses, and delivered
Scales of Justice
to her publisher.

Scales of Justice
was edited through 1954, and came out in Britain and the United States in 1955. Ngaio had decided to celebrate the Crime Club’s silver anniversary with an undiluted English cosy. The book was dedicated to her much-loved cousin Stella Mannings, who had typed sections of it, and in spite of its rural English setting it contained snatches of Ngaio and her private world. Nurse Kettle pushes her bike up to the top of Watt’s Hill and surveys the pretty village of Swevenings with its meandering trout stream, trees, gardens, lanes, hedges, golf course, stately home, and quiet country cottages dripping with summer roses. She is one of a handful of brilliantly sketched characters. Another is the slightly soft-in-the-head cat fancier Octavius Danberry-Phinn, who is
convinced that his feline family of nine are human (or perhaps, better). Ngaio adored cats herself. ‘
Just a scribble
to give you my most heartfelt sympathy on the loss of dear Chris S,’ she wrote to a friend on the death of her cat. ‘It really is shattering when they reach their little span & the blackness that follows can only be understood by the true catty-fan…she was indeed a most exceptional person & you will find it hard to think of a successor.’ Octavius Phinn’s Thomasina Twitchett had a real-life namesake in Ngaio’s portly tortoiseshell Tom Twitchet, who was being cared for at Marton Cottage by house-sitting friends Helen and Lyall Holmes. In the novel, one of Thomasina’s progeny is a young male called Ptolemy.

Octavius Phinn’s cats are an integral part of a plot based on the premise ‘that the scales of no two trout are alike: I mean, microscopically alike in the sense that no two sets of fingerprints correspond’. Colonel Cartarette published this fact in his treatise,
The Scaly Breed.
He is the murder victim and, with the assistance of Roderick Alleyn and Thomasina Twitchett, it is this little-known scaly fact that helps to catch his killer.

Alleyn is brought into the case by Lady Lacklander, because she is concerned that her family’s dark Nazi spy secret may be revealed to someone other than a ‘gent’. Her husband, a traitor, in the topmost echelons of the Foreign Office, was responsible for the suicide of Ludovic Phinn, Octavius’s son. The death of his only child, and his wife’s of a broken heart soon afterwards, sent Octavius catty. The class system inevitably rears its cosy head in
Scales of Justice,
but it is modified. Kitty Cartarette, the colonel’s unfortunate choice of a second wife, calls the snobs in Swevenings ‘survivals from the Ice Age’. And when Lady Lacklander hypocritically says of Kitty Cartarette, ‘You never know with that sort of people what they may do’, Alleyn curtly replies, ‘Nor with other sorts either, it seems.’

Many reviews were ecstatic. ‘
Excellently characterised
English village murder mystery,’ wrote the reviewer for
The Observer
in May 1955. ‘Miss Marsh’s best yet, I do believe. No-body is caricatured, not even the District Nurse; yet everybody is full of quirks…’ The murder of the ‘nice colonel’ was ‘pleasantly delayed’ and there was a ‘good surprise solution’.
The Sunday Times
agreed:

Miss Ngaio Marsh might be said to be now occupying the throne regrettably vacated by Miss Dorothy L. Sayers, in that she brings the true detective story closer to the straightforward novel than any other woman writer. Her work,
in fact, is as nearly flawless as makes no odds. Character, plot, wit, good writing, sound technique: all are there, together with the final requirement of the detective-story writer, ability to bamboozle the reader.

This high praise was followed in 1956 by a special honour awarded on the strength of the new novel’s popularity. Ngaio was back in New Zealand when it was bestowed, so Collins Crime Club editor George Hardinge sent it to her with a memo in December:

I am forwarding
herewith the ‘Scroll’ awarded to you as a result of the ballot organised by the Crime Writers Association and the
Daily Mail.
This should have been presented to you at an immense banquet at the Piccadilly Hotel, but was accepted by Mr Smith on your behalf in your absence. All is going well with OFF WITH HIS HEAD.

Ngaio began
Off With His Head
while she was living in Hans Road. Its inspiration was a freezing winter trip to stay with the Rhodeses who were living in the Kent village of Birling. Where
Scales of Justice
had been a light summery tale of angling assassination,
Off With His Head
was a chilling story of murder among Morris dancers in the village of Mardian.

At the book’s beginning, the door is opened to a frozen world. ‘The two Mardians were mentioned in the press and on the air as being the coldest spots in England.’ It is four o’clock on the afternoon of the winter solstice. Snow and frost lie deep and impenetrable on the ground. The trees are shuddering in the north wind as middle-aged Mrs Bünz’s tiny car makes its way through the bleakness. She is swaddled in homespun wool and wooden beads. ‘Mrs Bünz was the lady who sits near the front of lectures and always asks questions…She weaves, forms circles, gives talks, handthrows pots and designs book-plates.’ She is a fanatic folklorist in search of one of the richest remnants of pure pagan ritual left in England. In the distance, on a white hillside, she can see the ruins of an ancient Norman castle partly encircling a hideous Victorian mansion. This is where the Mardian Morris Dance of the Five Sons will take place. It is a fertility rite of death and resurrection handed down through generations of Andersens, who have been Mardian smithies as far back as human memory can recall.

Off With His Head
is a cleverly written cosy that uses ancient English folklore as the fabric of a fabulous homicide: the old Guiser Andersen from the smithy,
who plays the fool in the Mardian Morris Dance with his five sons, is found decapitated at the end of the solstice ceremony. To strains of traditional violin music, in full public view, he dances around the dolmen stone, on which he then lays his head. According to legend, the old fool had five sons among whom he divided his property and then they killed him. In the Mardian dance, the fool’s five sons symbolically sever his head, and later he is miraculously restored to life. Dancing with the fool and his sons are ‘Crack’, a hermaphrodite man-woman figure in skirted dress, and ‘Betty’, an equine monster costumed in metal hammered at the forge. Both are personifications of fertility who chase onlookers, tagging them with brushes dipped in liquid tar.

When the time comes for the fool to stand up, nothing happens, and the Guiser’s lifeless body is discovered behind the stone, with his head some feet away in a bloodied paper mask. His death shocks the small community. Everyone is involved in the event. The doctor plays the violin; the storekeeper is ‘Betty’; the vicar’s son, and heir of Mardian Castle, is ‘Crack’. And this has been the pattern for centuries: the Mardian Morris Dance is an ageless ritual of unification in which classes meet and are galvanized in the heat of a midwinter bonfire. Ngaio’s characterization is superb, and her knowledge of English folklore and dance is reinforced by meticulous research. The mystery of the decapitation whodunit is preserved cleverly to the end.

In a review of
Scales of Justice
published in the
New Statesman,
the critic wrote: ‘
Miss Marsh’s style
does not please everyone…and her books are often heavily loaded with crudely snobbish class-consciousness. But given the right plot, her workmanship can be magnificent.’ This critic liked
Scales of Justice
and for the same reason would have endorsed
Off With His Head,
because Ngaio observed the nuances of the British class system with a critical eye. If she was blinded in places by Anglophile admiration in her earlier novels, after the war she became more searching. In
Off With His Head,
aging representatives of the class system are archaic:

To Dame Alice…class was unremarkable and existed in the way that continents and races exist. Its distinctions were not a matter of preference but of fact. To play at being of one class when you were actually of another was as pointless as it would be for a Chinese to try and pass himself off as a Zulu.

She is 94 years old, and like the Guiser, one of the ‘survivals from the Ice Age’. The younger generation is different. It is Dame Alice’s great-great-nephew and heir Ralph, who is set to marry the Guiser’s granddaughter Camilla, who will ensure that future fertility dances take on a new aspect.

Ngaio worked on
Off With His Head
through the bitter English winter of 1954-55. Her next book,
Singing in the Shrouds,
consolidated her journey to England on the
Temeraire
and her trip home. It was begun in February 1956, on the boat back to New Zealand. She imagined what it would be like departing the Thames on a cargo freighter with a serial killer among its nine passengers. ‘Silly cows,’ the taxi driver mutters to PC Moir. He has waited an eternity on the wharf in the blackness and fog for his fare to come back. She is a shop girl with a huge box of hyacinths that she is delivering to celebrity Mrs Dillington-Blick, who is boarding the
Cape Farewell.
The flower girl never returns, and he steams in his taxi, as the night grows longer and colder.