Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime. Joanne Drayton

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       CHAPTER THREE Companions in Crime

      ‘It started off rather grandly with a printed invitation to Grosvenor House from the Detection Club,’ Ngaio explained later. They ate in a private dining room, with the Chief Constable of Surrey as guest speaker, but the meal was prelude to a more significant event: the 1937 induction of E.C. Bentley as president of the Detection Club. The cream of crime was there: Dorothy Sayers, John Rhode, Anthony Gilbert and Freeman Wills Croft, to name a few. After the speeches, they withdrew to a private drawing room where the real business began. Dorothy Sayers was mistress of ceremonies. Her imposing figure, ‘robust, round and rubicund’, towered over her colleagues. She struck Ngaio as something of ‘a cross between a guardsman & a female don with a jolly face (garnished with pince-nez), short grey curls, & a gruff voice’. Agatha Christie was not in attendance, but she would meet with Ngaio later that evening at the Detection Club rooms in Soho. In the meantime, Ngaio and her agent were seated in two chairs against an imposing rostrum. ‘I should explain before I go any further that my agent is a man with an ironic turn of mind…& a most singularly loud laugh.’ They were left alone in the room and suddenly the lights went out and there was blackness.

      A door at the far end opened (as all doors in detective novels open) slowly. In came Miss Dorothy Sayers in her academic robes lit by a single taper. She mounted the rostrum. Judge my alarm when I saw that among the folds of her gown she secreted a large automatic revolver. She lit candles on her desk &…uttered some intimidating order. In came the others in a solemn procession bearing lighted tapers & lethal instruments. There was the warden of the blunt instrument—a frightful bludgeon, the warden of the sharp instrument—I think it was a dagger—the warden of the deadly phial, & last of all John Rhode with a grinning skull on a cushion. And there, in the middle of them, looking apprehensive, as well he might, was poor Mr Bentley.

      With huge solemnity, Sayers administered the Detection Club oath to Bentley who promised:

      under pain of every horror that every concoctor of crime fiction has ever invented to obey the laws of detective fiction. Never to conceal a clue. Never to leave a knotty point unravelled. To place before the reader every scrap of information that is relevant to the solution…He took the oath & then close to my ear & without the slightest hint of warning, in a private drawing room at Grosvenor House at about 11 p.m. on a summer evening Miss Dorothy Sayers loosed off her six-shooter. The others uttering primitive cries, waved their instruments, blunt sharp & venomous, & John Rhode, by means of some hidden device, caused his skull to be lit up from within. And to my undying shame my agent laughed like a hyena. The ceremony was practically over, which is perhaps the reason my agent escaped with his life.

      Ngaio’s writing had earned her a place in the inner sanctum of British detective fiction. Since her début with A Man Lay Dead in 1934, she had written four titles, and when she arrived in London in the spring of 1937 it was with the manuscript for her sixth, Artists in Crime. She was sufficiently esteemed to be invited to a Detection Club dinner. If she had lived in London she would have been a member, but the club requirement that members attend five or six meetings a year prevented her from joining.

      She would dine out on stories of her Detection Club evening when she returned to New Zealand, giving speeches, broadcasts and press interviews, but in the meantime she savoured this and other experiences. ‘I get a feeling coming back to London which I must confess I don’t get coming back to New Zealand…something quite extraordinary happens,’ she told a BBC interviewer. ‘I always wonder perhaps it won’t this time but it always does.’ That familiar sense of ecstasy had returned and, to top it off, she discovered she was a celebrity among the many fans of crime fiction in Britain. In 1945, Edmund Wilson would write scathingly in The New Yorker of the sad addicts of crime fiction whose ‘talk about “well-written” mysteries is simply an excuse for their vice, like the reasons that the alcoholic can always produce for a drink’. In 1937, this addiction was well established in Britain and the United States, and Ngaio Marsh was now a celebrated supplier of whodunits.

      It was with some trepidation, therefore, that she contemplated a love interest for Alleyn. She had a winning formula with her monkish, bookish, aesthetic detective, and romance was a controversial issue among commentators. In 1928, S.S. Van Dine, writing under his real name of Willard Huntington Wright, had cautioned writers against involving their series detectives in romance. ‘There must be no love interest,’ he wrote in his list of ‘Twenty rules for writing detective stories’. ‘The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar.’ Perhaps as a consequence of this, when Dorothy Sayers introduced her sexually active Harriet Vane to Lord Peter Wimsey in Strong Poison in 1930, a critical outcry ensued. There was something not quite dependable about a detective who could be distracted from his crusade against crime by the sins of the flesh. Then there was reader distraction from the central problem of solving the murder, and the fact that detection was deemed a masculine pursuit. How could the puzzle be unravelled cleanly and fairly by a detective who was making romantic overtures to the opposite sex? Rationality must be ascendant in a genre with mind games at its core.

      Ngaio’s agent was dubious about her marrying Alleyn off. But there was a dilemma. Nigel Bathgate was young and shallow, and as a confidant he had worn thin; and Inspector Fox was like a huge, comfortable, slightly shabby armchair—just part of the furniture. Ngaio knew a wife would expose aspects of her detective that the men in his life could not. Marriage seemed the next logical step in his emotional development.

      On the voyage from New Zealand to England, Ngaio had mixed the ingredients of romance. Initially they had fizzed and popped and threatened to separate, like two incompatible substances in a beaker. At the beginning of Artists in Crime, Roderick Alleyn is on board the Niagara, making the same trip back to England as Ngaio. It could almost be Ngaio whom he sees on deck when he looks up, startled by a female voice.

      ‘Damn, damn, damn! Oh blast!‘…

      Sitting СКАЧАТЬ