Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime. Joanne Drayton

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СКАЧАТЬ Alleyn opens the door of the cab, turns on the dim roof light, and there is Bunchy, dead.

      Alleyn reels in shock. When he recovers a little, he asks the cabby why he is so sure it was murder.

      ‘Gorblimy, governor,’ said the driver, ‘ain’t I seen wiv me own eyes ‘ow the ovver bloke gets in wiv ‘im, and ain’t I seen wiv me own eyes ‘ow the ovver bloke gets out at ‘is lordship’s ‘ouse dressed up in ‘is lordship’s cloak and ‘at and squeaks at me in a rum little voice same as ‘is lordship.’

      Bunchy has been asphyxiated with his cloak, and a consultation with Bunchy’s doctor, Sir Daniel Davidson, confirms that Bunchy was ill: a healthy man might die in about four minutes, a man with a heart condition could take less than two, and Bunchy possibly died almost immediately.

      The parallels between Ngaio’s and Hume’s murders are obvious, but beyond the basic framework of the killings, the stories develop differently. Hume’s novel predated Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock mystery by a year, and Simon Caterson, in his introduction to The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, argues that they spearheaded two very different directions in crime fiction. ‘Where Conan Doyle concentrates on the establishing of the character of his protagonist, Hume’s detectives Gorby and Kilsip are merely two players within an ensemble of actors.’ Hume used his mystery to explore the world in which his characters lived rather than developing any one of them into a super-sleuth.

      The Queens of Golden Age crime wrote in the Conan Doyle tradition, but in Death in a White Tie Ngaio broke away from the conventional model. This mystery was much more a commentary on human behaviour and social mores. It had a super-sleuth at its centre, but also a flavour of what Hume achieved with his anatomizing vision of society. Ngaio’s criticism of the rhetorical aspects of the class system and her latent cynicism about the debutante process pushed boundaries. One of the most frequently made, and perhaps most valid, criticisms of Golden Age crime fiction was its class-consciousness and cultural bias. There can be no denying the fact that Death in a White Tie was a highly Anglo-centric detective novel, but it was also critical of the hierarchies that support class difference. Ngaio’s attitude to snobbery was clear—she disliked it. Her least appealing characters are the most pretentious. General Halcut-Hackett is classic regiment. To meet him, Alleyn ‘walked through a hall which, though it had no tongue, yet it did speak of the most expensive and most fashionable house decorator in London’. Halcut-Hackett’s study is permeated by the smell of leather and cigars; his face is ‘terra-cotta, his moustache formidable, his eyes china blue. He was the original ramrod brass-hat, the subject of all army jokes kindly or malicious. It was impossible to believe his mind was as blank as his face would seem to confess.’ But of course it is.

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