Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime. Joanne Drayton

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СКАЧАТЬ to establish themselves in New Zealand without the authority of overseas experience, so they were lured away. A few, like painter Frances Hodgkins, remained abroad, but most came back. The news, therefore, of Haszard’s death after a four-storey fall from a tower in Alexandria, in February 1931, sent shockwaves through conservative Christchurch. Many, already suspicious of her second husband Leslie Greener, believed he had killed her because of an affair she had while staying in London. Rumours abounded. His decision to bring his wife’s paintings back to New Zealand and sell them reignited controversy. Ngaio almost certainly saw Greener’s memorial exhibition, which he toured nationally in 1933, the year after she returned and began exhibiting herself. She showed with the CSA in 1933, and The Group in 1935, and continued to exhibit intermittently with The Group until 1947.

      Among the paintings she showed at the CSA in 1933 was Native Market, Durban, taken from the photograph and quick sketch she had made on her voyage to England. Ironically, there is more visual interest in the bustling human energies and vibrant marketplace colour than she ever achieved in the remote Canterbury landscapes she loved to paint. The simplified forms of the figures and produce have a sculptural quality reminiscent of Paul Cézanne and his precept that Nature can be structurally reduced to the cone, the cylinder or the cube. She was influenced by work she saw in Europe, but also by Australian Margaret Preston’s magnificent Post-Impressionist distillations of white-on-white: in Native Market, Durban, these are in the white folds and twists of turbans, veils and dresses.

      Her painting In the Quarry was exhibited at the CSA in 1935. The subject is a group of local relief workers building a section of Valley Road close to her home on the Cashmere Hills. She looks down on the scene from above. The summer day is hot, and men work, sit, stand or laze lethargically in wheelbarrows. The work is a vivid communication of an ordinary scene. Forms are simplified and geometric. Captivating contrasts of work and repose, blazing light and deep shadow, and the warm cream of a dusty dirt road cut through lush green grass, activate the canvas. At The Group exhibition that opened in early September 1932, English émigré and Post-Impressionist Christopher Perkins showed four oils and a group of drawings. His hard-edged naturalism, with its simplified form and colour, pointed to a new direction in New Zealand art. Ngaio had seen the exhibition, and his drawing Employed, reproduced in Art New Zealand in September 1932. This almost certainly influenced her In the Quarry. She called it Still Life for the CSA catalogue, a pun as her novel titles often were. After the ‘mistake’ was pointed out by a literal-minded art society official, the painting was retitled and entered in the correct section.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ