Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime (9 page)

But just as Ngaio was beginning to embrace modern ideas in painting,
her writing career swept her off in another direction.
Enter a Murderer
was published in 1935, along with
The Nursing-Home Murder,
which was to secure her place as a leading crime writer in Britain. The year before she had suffered from gynaecological problems. ‘
I spent three months
in hospital undergoing a series of minor operations and a final snorter of a major one.’ As a result, quite devastatingly for her, she could never have children. While she was in hospital Ngaio began thinking of another story, about a murder that occurred, not on a stage, but on the table of an operating theatre. The parallels are obvious. It was a closed environment with distinct hierarchies and procedures, and the same kind of intensity of performance. But the stakes were higher and life routinely in balance. Imagine if the patient were the British Home Secretary, fighting for his life after a ruptured appendix, and everyone around the operating table had a motive for killing him…

Again, in
The Nursing-Home Murder,
a play within the novel becomes a metaphor for the action. In the sterile chill of the anteroom, nurse Jane Harden and Sister Marigold help the two surgeons into their white gowns.

‘Seen this new show at the Palladium?’ asked [assistant surgeon Dr] Thoms.

‘No,’ said Sir John Phillips.

‘There’s a one-act play. Anteroom to a theatre in a private hospital. Famous surgeon has to operate on a man who ruined him and seduced his wife. Problem—does he stick a knife into the patient?’

Phillips, deeply affected by Dr Thoms’s description of the play, turns slowly to look at him. Nurse Jane Harden stifles an involuntary cry. Unable to contain himself any longer, he asks suddenly how the play ended. Dr Thoms replies, ‘It ended in doubt. You were left to wonder if the patient died under the anaesthetic, or if the surgeon did him in. As a matter of fact, under the circumstances, no one could have found out.’ As Roderick Alleyn will later point out, the operating theatre is ‘the ideal setting for a murder. The whole place was cleaned up scientifically—hygienically—completely—as soon as the body of the victim was removed. No chance of a fingerprint, no significant bits and pieces left on the floor. Nothing.’

The Home Secretary, Sir Derek O’Callaghan, dies of a lethal dose of hyoscine administered on the operating table. Because she needed medical knowledge,
Ngaio took on her only collaborator, Irish surgeon Dr Henry Jellett. She also consulted Sir Hugh Acland. Both men were her specialists while she was in hospital, and friends of the Rhodeses. What is new about
The Nursing-Home Murder
is its sustained focus on the political rather than just the criminally deviant. ‘Bolshie’ Nurse Banks’s impassioned speeches against capitalism introduce villainous ideology, which is any belief against the status quo. The veins stand out on her neck; her eyes bulge; she is fired with political fervour.

‘And for that reason [Sir Derek’s] the more devilish,’ announced Banks with remarkable venom. ‘He’s done murderous things since he’s been in office…He’s directly responsible for every death from under-nourishment that has occurred during the last ten months. He’s the enemy of the proletariat.’

Even Alleyn’s generous helping of upper-crust pie does not escape her scrutiny. ‘I know your type—the gentleman policemen—the latest development of the capitalist system. You’ve got where you are by influence while better men do bigger work for a slave’s pittance. You’ll go, and all others like you, when the Dawn breaks.’ Although Nurse Banks is like a bad fairy at a Society wedding, she cannot be the killer: it is a golden rule of Golden Age crime that personal motive can never be superseded by the political.

After the book was finished, Ngaio decided to produce it as a play,
Exit Sir Derek,
with a group of local amateur actors. Once again, she called upon the expertise of Henry Jellett. He was a perfectionist, insisting on endless rehearsals. A stickler for detail, he made a ‘
startlingly realistic
false abdomen with an incision and retractors’. He stationed a fully trained theatre sister in the wings to prepare the patient. He gave strict instructions to the cast that if a glove was dropped it must
not
be retrieved. The opening night audience was peppered with doctors, who came to see their colleague’s collaboration. The last Act was set in the operating theatre. To make it realistic, Jellett released ether into the audience. The medical malpractice began when the assistant surgeon dropped a glove, and picked it up off the floor. (The audience laughed, especially the doctors.) Meanwhile, beneath the felt abdomen the actor writhed in muffled gasps of pain. In the wings, the overexcited sister had clipped his flesh rather than the felt with the retractors. The nauseating smell of ether plus the graphic unveiling of the felt incision was too much for the circle. An ‘actress from an English touring company screamed and fainted’ and, with difficulty, was carried
out of the auditorium. In spite of initial hitches, the play opened to packed houses, and Ngaio considered sending the script to her agent, but decided it was too similar to another American stage play.

The rhythms of life at Marton Cottage were predictable and sedate, yet Ngaio’s books were far from tranquil. In
Death in Ecstasy,
published in 1936, she faced her phobia: poison. ‘The House of the Sacred Flame, its officials, and its congregation are all imaginative and exist only in Knocklatchers Row,’ Ngaio wrote in her foreword. This was a touch of irony, because in Christchurch the story was instantly recognizable.

Forty years before, the fictional House of the Sacred Flame’s flesh-and-blood forebears had existed in the town’s Latimer Square. American Arthur Bently Worthington had taken the globe, spun it around and chosen the most far-flung outpost to escape to. He was one of life’s real villains, a polygamist (with nine wives), a thief, a defrauder, a fake. Worthington, notorious in the United States for marrying wealthy women and taking their money, arrived in Christchurch in January 1890, with his ‘soul mate’, the already-married Mary Plunkett, international journal editor for the Christian Scientist sect, and her two children.

Worthington and Plunkett, renamed Sister Magdala, began a sect called the Students of Truth, based on a junket of beliefs that included pantheism and free love. By August 1892, with vast amounts pledged by the people of Christchurch, the sect built ‘
the imposing Temple of Truth
, and next to it a “magnificent 12-room residence” for the Worthington family’. Worthington’s mistake was to cross Sister Magdala, whom he banished with a splinter group to Australia when finances got low. She, and a collection of concerned Christchurch clergy, exposed Worthington in the press. The tide turned in September 1897, and at a series of revival lectures at the Oddfellows’ Hall 6,000 angry people gathered in Lichfield Street to protest against Worthington; the crowd had to be forcibly dispersed. Ngaio’s father, an arch sceptic and evangelizing atheist, chuckled over the episode until he nearly collapsed. His daughter was two years old when Worthington met his Armageddon, and Henry Marsh delighted in retelling the story as she grew up.

The version Ngaio tells in
Death in Ecstasy
is slightly different. Outside is blackness. The wind blows and rain beats against the temple roof as Sister Cara Quayne reaches a state of dishevelled ecstasy.

Her arms twitched and she mouthed and gibbered like an idiot, turning her head from side to side…She raised the cup to her lips. Her head tipped back and back until the last drop must have been drained. Suddenly she gasped violently. She slew half round as if to question the priest. Her hands shot outwards as though she offered him the cup. Then they parted inconsequently. The cup flashed as it dropped to the floor. Her face twisted into an appalling grimace. Her body twitched violently. She pitched forward like an enormous doll, jerked twice and then was still.

Ngaio’s equivalent of ‘Sister Magdala’ was dead.

‘
To this day
, on the rare occasions that I use poison in a detective story, I am visited by a ludicrous aftertaste of my childish horrors.’ Ngaio must have spent some time exorcizing the after-image of Cara Quayne, ‘eyes wide open and protuberant…At the corners of the mouth were traces of a rimy spume. The mouth itself was set, with the teeth clenched and the lips drawn back, in a rigid circle.’ This was a death mask of rigor mortis brought on by the ingestion of cyanide of potassium.

Ngaio researched every aspect of her novels, especially the deaths. She knew police procedure and kept a diagram on her wall of the hierarchy of command at New Scotland Yard. Her shelves at home began to fill with books on poisons, medical jurisprudence, and forensic medicine. She consulted her medical friends and the reference section of the local library. Ngaio never wrote anything unless she investigated it before Alleyn. The vividness of Cara Quayne’s ugly end, and its power as an image ‘to linger in the memory’, came from its authenticity, and from the fact that, as crime writer and critic P.D. James has said, ‘
Death is never
glamorised nor trivialised in Ngaio Marsh.’ In
Death in Ecstasy,
Ngaio harnesses the power of death to shock more fully than in her previous novels, and this she would refine further. Her fear of poison unlocked her imagination to explore the experience with a horror that was more than just intellectual.

Heroin was another substance she researched for her novel, because worshippers at the House of the Sacred Flame are hooked on more than just religion. Their highs come from heroin-laced cigarettes and a chalice of Le Comte’s Invalid Port spiked with pure alcohol. The sect, inspired by the teachings of Father Jasper Garnette, Ngaio’s Worthington figure, is broadly pantheistic, with Scandinavian deities Wotan and Thor mixed with a hint of free love between Garnette and his ‘Chosen Vessel’, Cara Quayne. ‘Garnette seems actually to have
persuaded her that the—the union—was blessed, had a spiritual significance,’ announces Alleyn in disgust. Cara, a young, gullible neophyte, has made a £5,000 donation to the temple building fund. She is hypnotized by Garnette’s religious prognostications and hooked on heroin, which, along with cocaine, was a favoured drug of 1930s detective fiction writers. Narcotics such as these were known as the abuse of the upper classes. It became fashionable to write about drugs and drug trafficking, along with blackmail, jewel robbery, embezzlement, trophy-wife snatching and will jumping. ‘Pin-point pupils’ were synonymous with high-society doping. Well-connected Arthur Surbonadier is shot at the Unicorn Theatre because of his drug connections. Wealthy Cara Quayne dies in an ecstasy of unwitting addiction. Drugs would become a regular theme in Ngaio’s novels.

Death in Ecstasy
makes teasing reference to Ngaio’s colleagues in crime. She is playing with the reader and with other writers of detective fiction. It is halfway through the story and Alleyn and Nigel Bathgate are ‘taking stock’:

‘Look here,’ said Nigel suddenly, ‘let’s pretend it’s a detective novel. Where would we be by this time? About half-way through, I should think. Well who’s your pick [for the murderer]?’

‘I am invariably gulled by detective novels [Alleyn replied]…You see in real detection herrings are so often out of season.’

‘Well, never mind, who’s your pick?’

‘It depends on the author. If it’s Agatha Christie, Miss Wade’s occulted guilt drips from every page. Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter would plump for Pringle, I fancy. [Freeman Wills Croft’s] Inspector French would go for Ogden.’

This is a delicious irony, a playful piece of unconscious self-consciousness that underscores the real nature of Alleyn’s and Bathgate’s existence compared with their fictional colleagues. Ngaio’s humour, her increased confidence as a writer, and her respect for practitioners like Christie, Sayers, and Freeman Wills Croft inspired this very public private joke. She also paid her respects to Arthur Conan Doyle. ‘I receive facts…as a spider does flies,’ announces Alleyn in Holmesian style, and Bathgate makes this slightly nauseating comment: ‘I am your Watson, and your worm. You may both sit and trample on me. I shall continue to offer you the fruits of my inexperience.’

Ngaio would return to the theme of human gullibility in the face of religious sham, but never again with quite the same echo of reality. ‘Damn, sickly, pseudo, bogus, mumbo-jumbo,’ says Alleyn with great violence about Father Garnette, and those were Ngaio’s thoughts. As an adult she was sceptical about all religion. She grieved for the loss of her adolescent fervour, wanted to believe in Christianity, but the leap of faith became a chasm.

Ngaio was the only agnostic Queen of Crime. Agatha Christie slept all her life with a crucifix by her bed; Dorothy Sayers was a theologian and a devout, if not always practising, Christian; and Margery Allingham became an avid follower of Christianity in her later years. Ronald Knox was the Roman Catholic chaplain at Oxford University when he formulated the precepts of Golden Age detective fiction in his ‘Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes’, published in 1928. His precepts were steeped in Christian ideology. For the Queens of Crime, writing about murder was not a betrayal of Faith but an affirmation, the Christian theme of sin and expiation played over and over again. The murder victim was the sacrificial lamb, given up so that the agent of sin, the murderer, could be found out and exorcized. The detective was the high priest, the detective story a modern apocrypha. Ngaio may have lost faith in the Christian message, but she never tired of retelling its story.

In the evenings, when she began a new book, Ngaio wandered from room to room. In perpetual motion she formed the ideas, and it was often daybreak before they flowed freely. She slept, then waited again until nightfall to begin bringing her characters alive. Her nocturnal habits meant she rose late, but the rest of the day was free for the theatre and to paint.
Exit Sir Derek
reconnected her with repertory, which was lively in the city, Stepping onto the stage took her back to her beginnings. As a child she had written a play in rhyming couplets for a cast of six, called
Cinderella,
and at St Margaret’s
Bundles
and
The Moon Princess.
It was the arrival of the Allan Wilkie Shakespeare Company in 1915 that rekindled her interest in writing for the theatre. She was transfixed, as if she was watching the progress of a miraculous comet across the sky. ‘
The opening night of
Hamlet
was the most enchanted I was ever to spend in the theatre.’ English actor-manager Wilkie, his striking actress wife Frediswyde Hunter-Watts, and their travelling company played to audiences in the Far East, North America and Australasia. They were the remnant of a bygone era, but to a centre starved of professional theatre they seemed rare and illustrious. People queued
for tickets, Ngaio and her student friends cut evening art classes, and for two weeks Shakespeare took Christchurch by storm.