Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime. Joanne Drayton

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СКАЧАТЬ helped generate a huge interest in the genre. During the inter-war period—marked by the end of one catastrophic conflict and the anticipation of another—there was a seemingly spontaneous desire among readers to assuage fear of universal death by focusing on the particular. The demand for detective fiction burgeoned. But it was a difficult field to break into, and its exponents were well practised. Considering the context of its launch, Ngaio’s A Man Lay Dead did remarkably well. Critics who had watched Christie, Sayers and Allingham develop seemed prepared to let Ngaio do the same, although there was confusion over the writer’s race and gender. The Times Literary Supplement critic took a stab. ‘Mr. Marsh’s manipulation of motive and alibi is neat and effective and repays careful attention’, but ‘His methods of detection…[are] somewhat distracting’, and Chief Detective Inspector Alleyn, a ‘most superior person, expensively educated and a connoisseur of good living [is] rather tiresomely familiar’. This kind of criticism inspired Ngaio to develop her own individual approach.

      She was working on a script that represented a new departure. Enter a Murderer drew on her knowledge of the theatre, ‘trying to get the smell and feel of backstage’. The Rat and Beaver at the Unicorn is a play-within-a-novel, which echoes rather than explains the action. Roderick Alleyn is in the audience at the Unicorn Theatre, as a guest of Nigel Bathgate. The tension is palpable in the final fatal scene of The Rat and Beaver. Anger boils between cartel bosses the Beaver, played by Surbonadier, and the Rat, played by Felix Gardener. The intensity of their venom has brought the audience to the edge of their seats. Bathgate feels extremely uncomfortable because he knows the fury between the men is more than just acting: off stage they hate each other. Inspector Alleyn’s eyes are riveted to the action. Nigel can see the tension in his face. The anxiety is almost unbearable.

      This is the moment of truth when the infamous Rat is exposed as an illicit drug trafficker, traitor, Nazi spy, or hero of the British Secret Service. The Beaver’s masterminding of the opium trade is well known. On stage he takes a revolver from his pocket and loads it, then addresses Gardener, the man who, in real life, has stolen his starring role and his lover.

      ‘So the Rat’s in his hole at last!‘

      ‘Beaver,‘ whispered Felix Gardener…‘You’re not a killer, Rat,’ he said. ‘I am.‘

      Gardener raises his hands above his head, but then in the doorway stands Stephanie Vaughan holding a revolver pointed at Surbonadier. The Beaver has been outmanoeuvred by his cheating stage girlfriend (and real-life ex-lover). He drops his hand. The gun hangs limp in his fingers. Sneeringly, Gardener thanks Stephanie as he takes the revolver from Surbonadier. She taunts him. Suddenly Surbonadier snaps, grabs at Gardener’s neck, and pushes his head back. Gardener’s hand jerks. Bang goes the gun across the blackness. The sound is deafening. ‘Surbonadier crumpled up and, turning a face that was blank of every expression but that of profound astonishment, fell in a heap at Gardener’s feet.’ Alleyn seems to know what has happened, even before the shocked usher finds him, seated on the aisle. He urges Nigel to get out as quickly as possible.

      Someone has exchanged real bullets for fakes, breaching the boundary between illusion and reality. In the make-believe of the play, the Rat shoots the Beaver. In real life, Arthur Surbonadier is dead on the stage floor. There is no doubt that Gardener has killed Surbonadier, but did he murder him? It is in the slippage between illusion and reality that the ambiguity of the crime exists. The act of murder presupposes intent: the act of acting assumes pretence and therefore innocence. Is Gardener innocent or guilty? The answer is in his face when Chief Detective Inspector Alleyn tricks him into climbing up a ladder backstage beyond the ceiling cloth and into believing that a large sack hanging from a rope in the ceiling is the body of his second victim, Props.

      ‘Alleyn!’ he cried in a terrible voice, ‘Alleyn!’

      ‘What’s the matter?’ shouted Alleyn.

      ‘He’s here—he’s hanged himself—he’s here.’

      ‘Who?’

      ‘Props—it’s Props.’

      His horrified face looked down at them.

      ‘It’s Props!’ he repeated…

      ‘Come down,’ said Alleyn.

      Gardener comes down, and within six rungs of the stage he turns and sees the men who are awaiting him. With an incoherent cry he stops short. His lips are drawn back, showing his gums. A streak of saliva trickles down his chin. He squints. ‘And how do you know it is Props?’ asks Alleyn. In that instant, the actor is unmasked to reveal the murderer, and his animal-like snarl is confirmation. Felix Gardener is the face of deviance exposed. In Ngaio’s closed world, he represents a temporary aberration in the fabric of normality. As in most Golden Age detective fiction, his psychology, his pathology, his reason for being what he is, is of less interest than the process of his identification and removal. The genre’s focus is the restoration of order, and in the anxious decades of inter-war uncertainty this was immensely appealing.

      The theatre provided Ngaio with the perfect place to stage a murder. It was a hermetic, hierarchical world where schedules and patterns of behaviour could be scrutinized and checked, and it was filled with sinister potential. Behind the stage was a labyrinth of backdrops, props and passageways; in front, when the lights went down, was a sea of blackness. Then there were the actors, their emotions heightened by the tensions of putting on a show and playing their parts. Among spectators, too, there was the buzz of excited expectation, and a tempting echo of crime novel readers, who were a parallel audience. It was an ideal backdrop against which to tease out issues. Ngaio was still intrigued by Pirandello’s Six Characters, with its metaphysical exploration of illusion and reality: ‘If you long above everything to be a director, this is the play that nags and clamours to be done.’ She was not yet directing actors, but she could direct characters. What interested her was the melodramatic way actors play themselves in real life.

      ‘Darling,’ [Stephanie Vaughan] said, taking her time over lighting a cigarette and quite unconsciously adopting the best of her six by-the-mantelpiece poses. ‘Darling, I’m so terribly, terribly upset by all this. I feel I’m to blame. I am to blame.’

      Surbonadier was silent. Miss Vaughan changed her pose. He knew quite well, through long experience, what her next pose would be, and equally well that it would charm him as though he were watching her for the first time. Her voice would drop. She would purr. She did purr.

      Enter a Murderer had more dramatic pace and change of scene than A Man Lay Dead, and the dialogue was more compelling and implicit in moving action along. The characters were convincing and in sharper relief. The theatre was not just a venue for crime, it was the book’s defining energy, creating a cohesive, vivid piece of writing.

      Ngaio would write sunk in an armchair, mostly at night, with a favourite fountain pen filled with green ink in an exercise book or on loose-leaf foolscap paper in a hard cover resting on her knee. Only when the house lights went down did the characters come onto the stage of her imagination. The scenes would run through her mind almost complete, as if she were watching them. After she had written 1,000 words or so, the curtains were drawn and she would go to bed. She was disciplined and methodical, writing fluently with relatively few changes. Those she did make were written in the margins, above the line, or on the back of the facing page. The next day, what she had written would be typed by the woman she paid to handle her correspondence. She needed help and enjoyed her secretary’s regular company.

      Ngaio found the recovery from her mother’s death ‘agonising’. Her father became a constant companion. ‘[When] we built a hut in the Temple Basin above Arthur’s Pass, he carried weatherboarding with the best of us up СКАЧАТЬ