Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime. Joanne Drayton

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СКАЧАТЬ in a period of sudden and chaotic change […] There is something deeply healthy in the implication that to deprive a human being of his life is not only the most dreadful thing one can do to him, but also that it matters to the rest of us.’ Faced with the flux of a rapidly changing world, readers sought intellectual escape in problem plots where sanitized death teased the minds of anyone from a housewife to a judge. While global war and economic slump eroded the class system and beat at the bastions of the family manor house, the detective novel offered fictional stability. Anybody with a stake in the restoration of traditional order was a potential reader. The detective novel portrayed a world of proscriptive hierarchies and reassuring ritual. It assumed a reasoned universe based on polarities of right and wrong where anarchy occasionally erupted but normality was always restored. And no one could be a more chivalrous representative of the status quo than that ‘perfect specimen of English manhood’, Roderick Alleyn.

      As an orderly man in an ordered form, he required little personal revelation from Ngaio Marsh. Like the other Queens of Crime, Ngaio shunned uncomfortable publicity. She seemed largely conformist, from a conservative background, writing in an era when women were expected to behave conventionally. The crime novel kept up appearances by preserving her from the necessity of exploring difficult feelings. The genre exposed to public scrutiny her intellect and literary skills rather than her emotions. Ngaio was the most secretive of this very self-protective group. As crime novelist commentator Jessica Mann writes, ‘she exemplifies in its most extreme form the reticence of the crime novelist…[she] never wrote anything which touched her emotions more deeply’ and ‘one senses withdrawal’.

      Ngaio was the only Antipodean Crime Queen, and although she often left New Zealand’s parochial fish bowl, she never escaped it. This made her, as she described it, ‘a looker on in England’. But she was also something of an Anglophile outsider at home. Colonization creates cultural refugees and Ngaio was one of these, a wanderer between worlds, never belonging completely to any place or culture. But displacement does not explain the intensity of her need for privacy. In 32 novels written over nearly 50 years, she exposed countless villains, but never herself. She was a doyenne of concealment, knowing exactly what evidence was incriminating and who would point the finger. There are, however, clues to understanding this complex and elusive woman. Ngaio felt strong emotions. ‘I guess I fell in love with them,’ she said of the aristocratic family she stayed with in Britain, and love is as good a place as any to begin a mystery.

      Ngaio’s rusty freighter-cum-passenger ship steamed up the Thames, docking at Tilbury in the early summer of 1928. She was ecstatic about her first visit to England. ‘We were bewilderingly gay,’ she remembered, ‘I got the tag end of a very ravished but very wonderful 1920s in London.’ She went immediately to stay with her friends Helen and Tahu Rhodes, and their burgeoning family of five children. On her arrival at their magnificent Georgian mansion, Ngaio was greeted by a joke ‘For Sale on Easy Terms’ sign, which set the tone of her stay. Ngaio found the Rhodes family’s theatricality, their irrepressible enthusiasm for practical jokes, for putting on costumes, for making up and acting up, irresistible. She would live with them on and off while in England; first at Alderbourne Manor near Gerrards Cross in Buckinghamshire, and later in London.

      This would become a ménage à trois of sorts, held together by the infatuation of the two women. Helen, known as Nelly, was the eldest daughter of Lord Plunket, who had been Governor of New Zealand from 1904 to 1910. In 1916, she married her handsome soldier husband, Captain Tahu Rhodes, at an English church packed with wounded soldiers who had been driven to the service in Red Cross vehicles from the New Zealand hospital at Walton-on-Thames.

      The pattern of Ngaio’s weekend stays with the couple had begun when they returned to New Zealand at the end of the First World War. Tahu Rhodes, a childhood friend, owned Meadowbank, a large sheep station at Ellesmere, about 30 kilometres south-east of her hometown of Christchurch. Through her fund-raising activities in the theatre, Ngaio picked up the threads of her acquaintance with Tahu and was introduced to his wife, Nelly. The women’s friendship became lifelong and binding.

      In New Zealand, Ngaio had wandered listlessly from one touring theatre production to another, searching for something permanent and sustaining. She had acted in, written and directed plays; she had been to art school and produced paintings for exhibitions; she had written articles for the Sun newspaper. But after the Rhodeses’ return to England in 1927, her enthusiasm for bit-jobs diminished in direct proportion to her desire to travel ‘Home’. Much more than a literal home, England was for her a cultural pantheon presided over by her giant of literary gods, William Shakespeare. When it came, the invitation from the Rhodeses burst like a blaze of fireworks across a night sky. She was rapturous. Her parents were the only tug on her emotions. However, her doting bank-clerk father, Henry Marsh, and his economizing wife, Rose, magnanimously scrambled to pay their only child’s passage to England. It meant a more spartan life than usual, but the opportunity for Ngaio to travel and stay with such illustrious friends abroad was impossible to miss.

      Alderbourne, with its vast number of rooms and workforce—which included a butler, a footman, a full domestic staff, plus a nanny and a lady’s maid—was a shock for Ngaio. The Rhodes family had returned to England to economize. They had found their big house, large staff and lavish life of weekend parties unsustainable in New Zealand. To Ngaio, however, Alderbourne Manor seemed luxurious. She waited for the ominous day when the Rhodes family ‘bandwagon’, as she called it, with its English ‘rebore’ and fresh ‘coat of paint’, lurched into another period of desperate insolvency. In the meantime, she took her seat.

      A photograph taken on a Rhodes family holiday in Kent shows the easy comfort of the family group and their coterie of perpetual guests. Four high-spirited children, wearing swimsuits, sit in the front row with a favourite dog, while another is carried piggyback. Behind them are the adults, in soft suits that pull and pucker. On the far right, slightly apart, stands Tahu Rhodes. He was a captain in the Grenadier Guards, and there is still a trace of formality in the slicked-back black hair, prominent moustache and heavy-featured, swarthy good looks. Beside him is the crop-haired, trouser-clad, boyish figure of Ngaio. She was nearly 6 feet (1.8 metres) tall, and even in her 30s she carried the imprint of youth and a touch of the awkward teenager in her lanky stature. She was striking, with strong rather than conventionally beautiful features, a prominent nose, dark close-set eyes and tightly wavy dark hair. Toppy Blundell Hawkes stands open-faced and smiling between Ngaio and Nelly. He was a good-natured English farm cadet who became a favourite after staying with the Rhodes family in New Zealand. Nelly is squat and somewhat plain, but the warmth of her personality is evident in her face, which beams broadly. A 1920s hat is pulled down tightly on her head, and she is wearing a full-length, flecked dress-suit, which is comfortable rather than elegant. What is evident in the photograph is their delight at being together on holiday.

      Ngaio joined the Society of Authors, and at Alderbourne Manor, in the midst of a noisy household of children, wrote syndicated accounts of her travels for newspapers in New Zealand. She hoped journalism would make her more independent of her parents’ finances. The first of many articles, under the pen name ‘A New Canterbury Pilgrim’, was published in the Christchurch Press on 1 September 1928. She began by describing her departure from New Zealand. ‘I know of no experience that compares with the adventure of setting out on one’s travels…for me, at least, the office of Thomas Cook and Son, Christchurch, will always be the enchanted parlour whose doors open straight into Wonderland.’ Like many creative colonial women of her generation, Ngaio felt travelling to Britain and Europe was like slipping into a magical parallel universe. New Zealand offered few opportunities in writing, art or the theatre, and, for women particularly, these were isolating, often desperate pursuits. Even after the First World War, remnants of Victorian provincialism hung like a miasma over cities such as Christchurch. Expatriate Australian artist and writer Stella Bowen described Christchurch’s sister city Adelaide as ‘a queer little backwater of intellectual timidity’ which, ‘isolated by three immense oceans…lies…prettyish, banal, and filled to the brim with an anguish of boredom’. This was what Ngaio felt she was leaving. It was also a chance to escape the confines СКАЧАТЬ