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Dame Edith Ngaio Marsh (1895-1982) |
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Of all the "Great Ladies" of the English mystery's golden age, including Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh alone survived to publish in the 1980s. Over a fifty-year span, from 1932 to 1982, Marsh wrote thirty-two classic English detective novels, which gained international acclaim. She did not always see herself as a writer, but first planned a career as a painter. "As is always the case, much of what was unearthed turned out to be of no relevance, much was of doubtful or self-contradictory nature and only a scanty winnowing found to be of real significance. It was as if the components of several jigsaw puzzles had been thrown down on the table and before the one required picture could be assembled the rest would have to be discarded." (from Grave Mistake, 1978) Ngaio Marsh was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, the only child of Henry Edward and Rose Elizabeth (Seager) Marsh. Her first name, pronounced "ny-o", is a Maori word, meaning "Reflections on the water", and was chosen by her uncle. Marsh's father, an emigrant from England, was a clerk in the Bank of New Zealand. Rose Elizabeth was a talented amateur actress. Her mother's grandfather was an early colonist in New Zealand. At the age of 15, Marsh entered St. Margaret's College, a private school run by the Church of England. During this period, she became interested in theatre and playwriting. From 1915 to 1920 she attended Canterbury University College School of Art. Ned Bristed, her childhood friend and fiancé, died in World War I. For a period, she taught speech craft at the school of Drama and Dancing in Christchurch. After painting, acting, and producing in the theater in the 1920s, she travelled in 1928 to England, and opened, in partnership with Mrs. Tahu Rhodes, a succesfull interior decorating business in Knightsbridge. Marsh's stay lasted for four years. When her mother became fatally ill, she returned to New Zealand. Her mother died in 1932, and for the following seventeen years, Marsh took care of her elderly father. They lived in Marton Cottage at Cashmere, where he had built a house for his family. Marsh's first novel, A Man Lay Dead (1934), which she wrote in London in 1931-32, introduced the detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn: a combination of Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey and a realistically depicted police official at work. Throughout the 1930s Marsh painted occasionally, wrote plays for local repertory societies in New Zealand, and published detective novels. In 1937 Marsh went to England. Before going back to her home country, she spent six months travelling about Europe. The critic and awarded mystery writer H.R.F. Keating included Surfeit of Lampreys (1940) among the 100 best crime and mystery books ever published. "Her writing is as good as any to be found in crime fiction. Let me end with one sentence from Surfeit of Lampreys that shows it. Roberta is arriving by boat in London. She looks out at the other ships at anchor in the early morning light. 'Stewards,' she says, 'pallid in their undervests, leant out of portholes to stare.' There is an artist in words." (Keating in Crime & Mystery: the 100 Best Books, 1987) In the center of the story is the Lamprey family, English aristocrats, seen through the eyes of a New Zealand girl. Marsh mixed in occultism with Shakespearean details – Lord Wutherwood's eye is put out as in King Lear, where Shakespeare had the Duke of Gloucester tortured and blinded on stage. During World War II Marsh served in a New Zealand Red Cross Transport Unit, driving repatriated soldiers in a hospital bus. She also worked with the drama department of Canterbury University and settled into a yearly routine that allowed her to spend about nine months writing a book and three months to mount a production of Shakespeare with her students. From 1944 to 1952 she was producer for D.D. O'Connor Theatre Management. In 1949 she returned to England and founded the British Commonwealth Theatre Company. One of her major directorial assignments include Pirandello's play Six Characters in Search of an Author, which she first saw in 1932 at the Westminster Theatre. "If you long above everything to be a director, this is the play that nags and clamours to be done," she later said. Working in two countries she would spend the rest of her time between England and New Zealand, writing mysteries during the sea voyages, and in theatrical activities. "She thought that the English landscape, more perhaps than any other, is dyed in the heraldic colours of its own history. It is there, she thought, and until it disintegrates, earth, rock, trees, grass, turf by turf, leaf by leaf and blade by blade, it will remain imperturbably itself. To it, she thought, the reed really is as the oak and she found the notion reassuring." (from Grave Mistake) After the death of his father in 1948, Marsh devoted about nine months of the year to writing and three months to theater. Curiously, she disliked writing, according to her cousin and chief inheritor John Dacres-Manning, but writing also provided her money for the theater work. Her dedication in producing Shakespearean plays was recognized by an award from the Order of the British Empire in 1949, and in 1966 she was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her services to literature and theater in New Zealand. In 1967 she produced Twelfth Night to open the new Ngaio Marsh Theatre in Christchurch. Her last full-scale production, Shakespeare's Henry V, was produced in 1972. Marsh was named in 1978 a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, along with Dame Daphne du Maurier and Dorothy B. Hughes. Her autobiography, Black Beech and Honeydew, came out in 1966 (revised in 1981). Marsh died in Christchurch, N.Z., on February 18, 1982. She is buried in the churchyard of Holy Innocents at Mount Peel. Her last novel, Light Thickens, which blended theatre and crime, was published posthumously in 1982. Marsh's best-known character is Inspector Roderick Alleyn. The name was created as a compliment to her father, who had attended a public school founded by the Elizabethan tragedian Edward Alleyn. Roderick Alleyn is assisted by Inspector Fox who can quote Shakespeare. Later Alleyn marries Agatha Troy, an absent-minded, thin, shy and funny painter, whose character was not far from Marsh's own in the 1930s. Another figure from the first books is the journalist Nigel Bathgate, whom Alleyn could not tolerate. Marsh later dropped him from the stories. Like Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey, Alleyn has a noble background, but instead of becoming a diplomat he joined the police force after returning from World War I. Four of Marsh's Alleyn stories were set in the theatre, Enter a Murderer (1935), Opening Night (1951), Vintage Murder (1937), and Killer Dolphin (1966). Overture to Death (1939) was set in a small village, Winston St. Giles, where Alleyn returned occasionally in later books. In some stories Alleyn solves murders outside England – in Australia and New Zealand (Vintage Murder, Colour Scheme, Died in the Wool), France (Spinsters in Jeopardy), or in Italy (When in Rome) – Alleyn spoke French and Italian. During World War II Alleyn chased spies, but after the war he continued in the same style as in the 1930s. A modern psychopath appeared in Singing in the Shrouds (1959). Typical of Marsh's mysteries is vivid characterization and dialogue. Julian Symons has praised in his book Bloody Murder (1985) Marsh's capacity for amused observation of the undercurrents beneath ordinary social intercourse, as in the novel Opening Night. Marsh also wrote plays, a television play Evil Liver (Crown Court series, 1975), and a book about New Zealand. In 1978 a New Zealand television company released adaptations of four of her novels as the "Ngaio Marsh Theatre." Although her novels had English protagonists, relied on British class structure and social environment, she thought of herself as a New Zealander. Marsh's long association with the aristocratic Rhodes family colored her reticent personality, which is portrayed in the novel Blue Blood by Stevan Eldred-Grigg. "The more deeply and honestly," Marsh wrote in her autobiography Black Beech and Honeydew, "one examines one's characters the more disquieting becomes the skulduggery that one is obliged to practise." The novels which Marsh set in her home country, Colour Scheme (1943), Vintage Murder, and Died in the Wool (1944), show a sympathy for the Maoris, and a love of the landscape. Her Mount Peel homestead was memorialized as "Deepacres" in the prologue to Death of a Peer (1940). As her one of her friends, Jack Henderson recalled, Marsh was "thin, mannish in appearance, flat-chested, rather gawky . . . dressed usually in beautifully cut slacks (less common then than now), large feet with shoes like canal boats, a deep voice – yet intensely feminine withal" (in Lesbian Studies in Aotearoa/New Zealand by Alison J. Laurie, 2001, p. 51). During her stays in London, she wore expensive clother to suit her 5-foot-10-inch frame, and drove a Jaguar sports car. Her second Jaguar was a well known vehicle on The South Island of New Zealand. Unlike her shy heroine, Agatha Troy, Marsh never married, but she also denied being lesbian. She had both lesbian and gay characters in her novels, although they were not portrayed in exceptionally positive ways. In Hand in Glove (1962) lesbian love is ridiculed as the cross-class passion of an ageing spinster in adopting a worthless young woman. (From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction by Susan Rowlands, 2001.) Marsh's lifelong friend was Sylvia Fox, with whom she made several trips. In her autobiography she refers to her female companions only as secretaries/traveling companions, and tells that she fell in love at the age of 58 with an Russian expatriate, Vladimir Muling, who was a married man. Marsh maintained a friendship with both members of the couple.
Selected writings:
Some rights reserved Petri Liukkonen (author) & Ari Pesonen. Kuusankosken kaupunginkirjasto 2008 |
