Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime (25 page)

The matter would have rested in the family crypt along with Sir Henry,
if anonymous letters suggesting that he had been murdered had not begun circulating. The final straw comes when the stiff body of white-saddled Carabbas the cat is found in the garden. The murderer has inadvertently killed twice. When Barker, the butler, had taken in Sir Henry’s morning tray, Carabbas had fled from the room. Barker thought Sir Henry had forgotten to let him out, and was surprised that the cat had not woken him. But it was too late to wake either Sir Henry or Carabbas, because both had been poisoned. Into this double homicide walks the unsuspecting Chief Detective Inspector Alleyn, for a touching reunion with his wife and an instant immersion in English murder. The novel makes constant references to the play Ngaio had just finished directing. There are mentions of a ‘little theatre’ and lines quoted from
Macbeth.
The play would continue to simmer in her novelist’s imagination.

Final Curtain
was well received in Britain and the United States. ‘
Another of Ngaio’s delightful who-dun-its
,’ announced the critic for
The Sunday Times
in April 1947. ‘[Sir Henry] and his curious family are such good company that you would be quite content to read about them without any murder-mystery at all.’
The New York Times
identified exactly what Ngaio’s writing offered ‘whodunit maniacs’:

Ahead of them lie certain assured items of perfection. There will be excellent craftsmanship applied to the everyday matter of crime detection. There will be civilized human beings making good conversation which relies on wit rather than gore. There will be full-bodied characterization and murder proceeding quite naturally out of some small frustration uncomfortably like one’s own pet neurosis.

Only one newspaper hinted at a debate that had raged through the newspapers and had recently reached the misty shores of New Zealand: Golden Age detective fiction’s relevance in the post-war era. ‘What will happen to the detective story,’ asked the
Daily Sketch,
‘now that so many country houses are being nationalised, and week-end parties, the detective’s happy hunting ground, may soon be a thing of the past? We shall be denied such a story as
Final Curtain
in which Miss Ngaio Marsh is at her best.’ Was there a place for stylized murder in a world that had experienced Auschwitz and the atom bomb?

In September 1945, the
New Zealand Listener
printed sections of an article by critic Edmund Wilson, published in January in
The New Yorker.
His title,
referring to Agatha Christie’s 1926 best-seller, was ‘Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?’ Wilson was vitriolic in his attack on Golden Age crime writers. His criticism of Sayers’
The Nine Tailors
was bitter; Ngaio’s
Overture to Death
fared even worse:

It would be impossible
, I should think, for anyone with the faintest feeling for words to describe the unappetizing sawdust which Miss Marsh has poured into her pages as ‘excellent prose’ or as prose at all except in the sense that distinguishes prose from verse. And here again the book is mostly padding. There is the notion that you could commit a murder by rigging up a gun in a piano, so that the victim will shoot himself when he presses down the pedal, but this is embedded in the dialogue and doings of a lot of faked-up English country people who are even more tedious than those of
The Nine Tailors.

He found Margery Allingham’s
Flowers for the Judge
wooden and unreadable. The characters were flat and stock, and the circumstances of the murders unconvincing. ‘How can you probe the possibilities of guilt among characters who all seem alike because they are all simply names on the page?’ he asked. Wilson’s aggravation continued unabated until he reached the conclusion that the readers were addicts and the ‘reading of detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks between crossword puzzles and smoking’.

Ngaio found it disturbing to be pilloried. There were heated rebuttals overseas as well as at home. The
New Zealand Listener
published a defence of detective fiction. The author accepted some of Wilson’s more moderate claims, but disagreed adamantly with his comments about Sayers’
The Nine Tailors,
and was enthusiastic about Ngaio’s New Zealand novels. ‘
The local colour in these books
is excellent. I am much less interested in the mystery of
Died in the Wool
than in the character-drawing and the fine pictures of McKenzie Country landscape.’ Ngaio wrote book reviews for the
Listener
and letters to the editor on pronunciation and the Kiwi accent, but was not drawn into the whodunit debate until October 1947, when she was invited to comment on the question: ‘Is the Detective Story Dying?’ ‘
I think that the character
of the detective novel is changing,’ she responded,

and changing very markedly. Many readers who, ten years ago, devoured the purely two-dimensional piece, depending entirely upon its interest as a puzzle, now demand from their detective novels a very much more solid affair. They want three-dimensional characters, and psychological as well as intellectual problems…the entirely mechanical detective novel is yielding to the longer, more elaborate and less conventional plot.

For her own sake, Ngaio hoped the decline would be gradual and ‘that the thing itself may merge almost imperceptibly into a changed form’.

The revenue from the sales of Ngaio’s books was essential to keep her life going. Often over the past few years she had dug deep into her own pockets to assist the drama society, contributing to wardrobe costs and financing anything from post-production parties to the construction of purpose-built wooden property boxes. Much of her discretionary income went into the theatre. Her professional career as a writer subsidized her vocation as a director, but there were also everyday costs that were demanding. Her father’s health was rapidly failing. The Crawfords were there to help him when Ngaio was away, but his care was getting too much even for them. Henry had been active all his life and a sedentary deteriorating existence was more than he could abide. Ngaio could see his death coming and, with it, the end of an irreplaceable connection to her past. He was the surviving parent of an intense adult-and-only-child union, a last connection to her childhood and to her mother.

In March 1948, Ngaio sat Henry down in the garden at Marton Cottage, with the vista before him of the city that he had watched grow. She propped a folio of foolscap paper on his knee and urged him to record his life, for her and for posterity. It was a struggle for him to hold the pen. His mind wandered along the corridors of distant memories. He remembered stories of his father and the clipper ships that brought tea from the New World to the Old. This was a time of wealth for his family, then decline, and the untimely death of his father at 51 years of age. Henry was at school at Dulwich College with his brother Edward when the news came. Dulwich had been chosen specially, because it was a public school with a good reputation but without the huge fees of Eton or Harrow. P.G. Wodehouse described his years at Dulwich as ‘six years of unbroken bliss’; Raymond Chandler had also been a pupil. It was a good school, but the Marsh boys had to leave, because there was no money to keep them there. Knocked
off-course, Henry tried banking, but became ill with pleurisy.

It was while recovering on the vast plains of South Africa’s veldt that he discovered one of his great loves: Nature. ‘
I fairly took to the country
and found its appeal very strong being exceedingly keen on animals, natural history and field sports…I simply adored the life and the surroundings.’ He reluctantly returned in England in July 1884. For about two years he worked in a leather factory office, before another opportunity surfaced and he ended up in New Zealand in 1888. Forced to take a position with the Bank of New Zealand in Dunedin, he was in Dunedin for two years before moving to nearby Palmerston for a year, and then to Christchurch. It was a lonely life of single-men’s boarding establishments, punctuated by the highlight of amateur theatre. Henry began acting in Dunedin and continued it in Christchurch where he met Rose Seager. ‘I married as fine a woman as any man could deserve, and although poor were very happy and blessed with our child a daughter who was the pride of our life.’ Often during his memoir he drifted onto the subject of his wife and daughter.

Henry’s potential was never realized in New Zealand. Poverty was always near, but Rose stoically made so much of what they had and did not complain. She was his great source of pleasure, and Ngaio was ‘brightness itself…A most intelligent child a keen sense of humour and always drawing or writing stories as soon as she could do anything and of course we thought the world of her.’ His wife was the authority figure; Henry was the fun. A fervent atheist, he believed the Church was a scourge. ‘Why can’t there be a religion of universal brotherhood & ethics and rules for the whole of mankind expedient & suitable for the life of communities without all the fictitious dogma of the different religions which have been the curse of humanity?’

Henry’s instinct was to do the best for his family, so when he lost everything that might have put them ahead he was broken. Because he was in charge of his till at the bank, he was responsible when one day a shortfall was discovered—and not just a small amount, but £500. Henry knew who the culprit might be, but could never prove it. The missing cash was nearly 10 years’ income for a housemaid; Henry himself earned not much more than a pound a week. It was a fortune to find; his fortune, as it turned out, because he repaid the money with a family inheritance that could have settled his future. Henry never recovered. It was hard on the family because there were rumours and rumblings, but worse still was the fact that he could not forgive himself for being so trusting or, perhaps, absent-minded.

When his father-in-law, Edward Seager, was in his 90s he used to stay with them at Marton Cottage, look out over Christchurch and shake his fist at the city for which he had done so much but which had forced him to retire ignominiously from Sunnyside Hospital in favour of a man with qualifications. He had spent his last years as a court usher. His son-in-law came to understand his anger.

Although it haunted him still, Henry chose not to mention the missing money in his memoir. What he did highlight, however, was his great foresight in buying on the Cashmere Hills. The family were free now from chest infections and Christchurch’s lowland epidemics and, like his daughter, he rejoiced in the outdoor life. ‘I travelled on a bicycle the 2 or 3 miles from town carrying most of our supplies and as soon as I got home I got into rough working clothes and worked hard with pick, shovel and wheelbarrow and got as hard and strong as a horse.’ He was proud of his wife’s strict upbringing of Ngaio, because he felt she had given Ngaio the best values and opportunities to succeed—the right things to read, the right schools, the right acquaintances—and look how it had paid off. He could not have been more pleased.

He mentioned Ngaio’s early days playing with Tahu Rhodes, but not the disaster of her 10th birthday party. Henry had added the sparkle to an otherwise flat life, and his ginger-beer brewing was a case in point. The family’s gardener had made it when Henry was young in Essex, and he bragged about how good it was. His mother sent out the recipe, and in preparation for his daughter’s birthday he laid down a ginger-beer brew in the cellar under the verandah. He bought ‘half a used brandy cask’ and all the ingredients, and pungent fumes wafted through the rooms of Marton Cottage. For weeks he eyed the bottles in anticipation. By the time Ngaio’s birthday came round they were ripe for the popping. Gramp Seager was there, playing the piano, and all the myriad aunts, uncles, friends and relations. Henry disappeared into the garden and arrived back with a tray laden with fizzing glasses. It was a super-brew, they all agreed. Then suddenly everyone was screaming with laughter while ‘
children, unreproved
, tacked about the room, cannoned into each other, fell, threw cream cakes or subsided on the floor in a trance’. No one could remember quite how it ended. Henry was adamant. ‘It’s no good you thinking it was my ginger-beer,’ he told his wife. But these were famous last words, because on a second sampling Rose and Ngaio were left comatose on the carpet, staring at the ceiling for an afternoon. In the end, Henry decided the impregnated brandy cask was to blame.

It was something of an enchanted life, and letting go was harder than he
expected. He warded off the boys who hung around Ngaio. He and Rose had ambitions for her, and a male on the horizon was a threat. They could not face Ngaio going away. Allan Wilkie became a great friend, as did the Rhodes family, but both parents expected these relationships would enhance her life rather than separate her from them. ‘Ngaio was invited to spend a weekend at Meadowbank the end of it was Nellie Rhodes and she became such great friends we could hardly get her home sometimes,’ he remembered. ‘I can never feel grateful enough for the chances they gave her to meet interesting people & people of note and their experience & knowledge of different kinds of fellow beings and varied surroundings.’ And that was where his memoir ended. His health had deteriorated so much that he struggled to write.

Henry was 85 years old in May 1948, and slipping, although not so fast that he did not take great pleasure in Ngaio being awarded the Order of the British Empire in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List in June. He was delighted and so was she. She had won the award, not specifically for her crime writing, but more it seemed for her services to the theatre. She had worked tirelessly over the past decade, directing, writing about directing and the stage, and pushing vigorously for a national theatre. He knew she deserved it. But he would have taken special pleasure if there had been more mention of her detective novels, because he was the inspiration for these. Ngaio knew he ‘
was keen on detective stories
’, and one day she said, ‘I’ll write you one.’