Read the book: «Death on the Air: and other stories»

Foreword

What was so special about Ngaio Marsh? For a start she was one of the select band of female writers – those so-called ‘Queens of Crime’ – who dominated the world of the classical detective story in its heyday during the first half of the century. Yet unlike her rivals, writing was never her first love; she trained as a painter and later devoted herself to the theatre. In addition she was a New Zealander who, although a devoted Anglophile, was able to write about English life from the standpoint of a spectator – and the onlooker, as the well-known saying goes, sees most of the game.

This unusual background suffuses her work and sets her apart from her famous contemporaries. She writes better than Agatha Christie, and unlike Dorothy Sayers Ngaio Marsh never commits the sin of falling in love with her detective and lapsing into sentimentality. An elegant, disciplined writer, Marsh deserves to be read and reread not just for her plots but for her characterization, for her painter’s eye view and for her outsider’s insights into the heart of a vanished social world. But most important of all, her books provide such satisfying entertainment; amusing and civilized but with an underlying sensitivity and compassion, they bring grace to a genre not noted for emotional depth. Ngaio Marsh was not just a manufacturer of literary crossword puzzles. She was a supremely readable storyteller who time and again compelled the reader to race eagerly onwards to the final page.

An only child, she was born in a suburb of Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1895. Her father was a bank clerk who had emigrated from England seven years earlier, and when she was still small, the family moved to a newly-built house in the Cashmere Hills outside the city. This was to be Marsh’s home for the rest of her life, for although she was striking in her appearance and popular with her contemporaries, a certain deep-seated shyness and the death in the First War of a young man who was special to her ensured that she never married.

Her ability to write well was recognized at school, but her primary talent at that time lay elsewhere, and at the Canterbury College School of Art she won a number of prizes and scholarships. Meanwhile her interest in the theatre had been kindled, and in her twenties she somehow found the time to pursue all three of her talents: living at home with her parents she devoted herself to painting, but she was also earning money writing articles for one of the Christchurch newspapers, and when she was in her mid-twenties she had an unexpected invitation to join a touring company as an actress. However, she was always more interested in what went on behind the scenes at a theatre, and in later life she turned not to acting but to producing and directing.

Gradually she began to feel that painting was not the medium which fully satisfied her, and amidst the restlessness which must have accompanied this realization, she welcomed the chance to go to England for the first time. She was thirty-three. The friends who had invited her to stay were English aristocrats who had earlier returned home after many years in New Zealand, and it was Marsh’s experience of their social milieu which provided the background for some of her most successful novels. It is often said that her books are riddled with snobbery, but England between the Wars was still a snobbish and class-ridden society. It is a mistake to look back at those times through the lens of a more egalitarian era and make anachronistic judgements. Marsh was writing about what she had seen and experienced. She was trying to reflect reality, not to peddle politically correct dogma.

The visit to England proved to be the most liberating experience and enabled her to develop a stylish, sophisticated persona which was different from but not at odds with her New Zealand self. She stayed for over three years and afterwards returned regularly for visits, but this divided life was not without its difficulties. It is hard to be drawn simultaneously to two cultures, hard to maintain a unity of personality when one is at heart torn in two, and the inevitable tensions are reflected in her writing. She wrote of both England and New Zealand, but as New Zealand claimed an increasing amount of her time, her memories of English life in the past became more reliable than her knowledge of English life in the present – with the result that her final novels with English settings appear marooned in a time-warp. It is a measure of her talent that despite this flaw the last novels are still immensely enjoyable.

During that first long visit to London, which lasted from the end of 1928 to the summer of 1932, she continued her career in journalism, but a visit from her mother, always an authoritative figure in Marsh’s life, resulted in an attempt to write more seriously. A novel was begun, a murder story to suit the current literary fashion, and in 1931 Marsh’s famous detective Roderick Alleyn finally made his entry on to the blank page.

In her early books Marsh is clearly feeling her way as a novelist, so the Alleyn of her first mystery, A Man Lay Dead, is merely an effete, pale version of the man he later became. Douglas G Greene, the American expert on crime and mystery fiction, puts this well when he writes that though Alleyn might have emerged from Lord Peter Wimsey, he became ‘the spiritual ancestor’ of P D James’s Adam Dalgleish. Fortunately Alleyn developed with speed, and in Artists in Crime, published in 1938, Marsh moved into top gear as a crime writer. In this novel Alleyn meets his future wife, Troy, and in the next novel, Death in a White Tie, he wins her. For the next twenty years after this classic pair of novels, Marsh is at her zenith, and even the fading of her powers is marked by outbursts of her old brilliance, notably in Black as he’s Painted, published in 1974. Her penultimate novel, Photo-Finish, finally does justice to the beauty of her native land, where she was to die in 1982 at the age of eighty-six.

Every Marsh novel features Alleyn, and as one looks back at her literary career it is hard not to wonder why she never moved on from writing mysteries to writing novels where there was no murder. It would seem she had no wish to move on; it was as though she could never quite summon the energy to break through into a different territory. She certainly had the ability to do so, and in some of her best novels, such as Opening Night, the crime is long delayed, as if the format had become an unwanted necessity. Perhaps this lack of will to move beyond the genre arose because writing was only the second string to her bow and because as she journeyed through middle age so much of her creative energy was channelled into the theatre. Almost single-handedly she generated interest in classical drama in New Zealand and was responsible for many outstanding productions. She was also involved in the creation of a new theatre which was eventually named after her, and in 1966 she was awarded a DBE for all her work in this field. Since she was so innovative in her theatrical career, is it really surprising that she avoided innovation whenever she retired to the typewriter? Alleyn was the good friend who provided stability and familiarity, but her heart belonged to Shakespeare, that glittering master who kept her constantly seeking new adventures.

It can in fact be argued that Ngaio Marsh’s problem was not that she was untalented but that she was too talented. Her painting, her writing and her theatrical career were all jostling for pride of place in her life, and the miracle was that she found the time and energy to excel in all three fields. In addition to the prizes she won at art school in her youth and to the DBE bestowed upon her in old age, she was made a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in recognition of her literary achievements, and it is because of her status as a crime writer that this present book, Death on the Air and Other Stories is being published.

But the collection is not only essential reading for aficionados. It will also, I believe, serve as an appetizer for those who have never read her novels. The first two essays, one on Roderick Alleyn and one on his wife Troy, provide the perfect introduction to her hero and heroine. Marsh’s humour, her civilized grace, her sensitive intelligence – all are present here in these two lightly etched but intriguing portraits. They are followed by a most diverse sequence of items: I Can Find My Way Out is an example in miniature of the theatre mysteries in which she excelled, and there are echoes of the novels Opening Night and Death at the Dolphin; similarly, Chapter and Verse: The Little Copplestone Mystery is an example in miniature of the English village murder story which Marsh explored at length in Overture to Death, Off with his Head and Grave Mistake; finally Morepork, perhaps the strongest short story in the book, provides a taste of the novels set in New Zealand, Vintage Murder, Colour Scheme, Died in the Wool and Photo-Finish. Moving on from the miniatures, admirers of the classical murder puzzle may prefer Death on the Air, but my own favourite in this book is the television script Evil Liver. Written in the 1970s for the series Crown Court, this work shows more clearly than any of the short stories Marsh’s gift for characterization by means of dialogue.

So we have here a literary smorgasbord, little slivers of Ngaio Marsh’s creativity, signs which point beyond themselves to the novels which made her literary reputation. For the aficionados the book is a delicious feast which will stimulate all manner of nostalgic memories (note the use of those two unusual names Hersey and Caley – remember Lady Hersey Amblington in Death and the Dancing Footman and Caley Bard in Clutch of Constables?) and for the newcomers the book is a seductive starter, hinting at luscious treats to come.

Speaking for myself, I confess that the book reminds me of how much I owe to her. I began to write crime novels when I was seventeen, and I was inspired to do so after reading Ngaio Marsh. My first published book was a mystery and I wrote five more before moving on to write novels which fell outside the genre. Even now, thirty years after my early struggles, I can look at my current work, a series of novels about the Church of England in the twentieth century, and still see traces of Marsh’s influence on me. It was she who taught me to divide my chapters into sub-chapters which would be more easily digested by the reader. It was she who taught me the importance of ending every chapter with a cliff hanger and every sub-chapter with a sentence designed to lure the reader on. It was she who taught me how to mesh prose and dialogue in a seamless narration, to view characters sensitively but without sentimentality and to keep melodrama at bay with injections of humour. I admired her unpretentious prose, her skill in wasting no words, her painter’s eye, her dramatist’s sense of timing. I liked her people, even her murderers (the nicest murderer is in When in Rome) and I was enthralled by the realistic glimpses she gave me into the vanished world of the 1930s which the second world war destroyed but which still lived on so vividly in the memories of those who brought me up. My all-time Marsh favourite, Death in a White Tie, magically conjures up that doom-laden glitter of the London Season as the 1930s drew to their disastrous close.

And finally I must confess she influenced me on a very personal level. Was there ever such an attractive detective as Roderick Alleyn in his prime? He was the gold standard by which I judged all the men I met in my teens. Marsh chose not to follow the Alleyns into the more intimate dimensions of their married life, but she was magnificent in creating on paper the ideal relationship which we all long for but which many of us never achieve. I remember as a teenager being deeply envious of Troy and looking hopefully – but alas, always fruitlessly – for that handsome, clever, modest, well-educated, sophisticated, sensitive, witty English gentleman whom Marsh described with such affection and élan. In the end I gave up and married an American, but it is a tribute to Ngaio Marsh that she was able to create a character whom I found so intensely real.

When the last novel, Light Thickens, was published posthumously in 1982, I grieved that there would be no more encounters with Roderick Alleyn. Then I was given this book and it seemed like a gift from beyond the grave. I commend this collection to everyone, and can only add that after reading the book at a sitting, I went back and reread the novels. Ngaio Marsh was one of the great writers of her day and has enchanted millions of readers all over the world for decades. Taste this smorgasbord! It’s an invitation to a literary feast.

Susan Howatch

August 1994

RODERICK ALLEYN

He was born with the rank of Detective-Inspector, CID, on a very wet Saturday afternoon in a basement flat off Sloane Square, in London. The year was 1931.

All day, rain splashed up from the feet of passers-by going to and fro, at eye level, outside my water-streaked windows. It fanned out from under the tyres of cars, cascaded down the steps to my door and flooded the area. ‘Remorseless’ was the word for it and its sound was, beyond all expression, dreary. In view of what was about to take place, the setting was, in fact, almost too good to be true.

I read a detective story borrowed from a dim little lending library in a stationer’s shop across the way. Either a Christie or a Sayers, I think it was. By four o’clock, when the afternoon was already darkening, I had finished it, and still the rain came down. I remember that I made up the London coal fire of those days and looked down at it, idly wondering if I had it in me to write something in the genre. That was the season, in England, when the Murder Game was popular at weekend parties. Someone was slipped a card saying he or she was the ‘murderer’. He or she then chose a moment to select a ‘victim’, and there was a subsequent ‘trial’. I thought it might be an idea for a whodunit – they were already called that – if a real corpse was found instead of a phony one. Luckily for me, as it turned out, I wasn’t aware until much later that a French practitioner had been struck with the same notion.

I played about with this idea. I tinkered with the fire and with an emergent character who might have been engendered in its sulky entrails: a solver of crimes.

The room had grown quite dark when I pulled on a mackintosh, took an umbrella, plunged up the basement steps and beat my way through rain-fractured lamplight to the stationer’s shop. It smelt of damp news-print, cheap magazines, and wet people. I bought six exercise books, a pencil and pencil sharpener and splashed back to the flat.

Then with an odd sensation of giving myself some sort of treat, I thought more specifically about the character who already had begun to take shape.

In the crime fiction of that time, the solver was often a person of more or less eccentric habit with a collection of easily identifiable mannerisms. This, of course, was in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes. Agatha Christie’s splendid M Poirot had his moustaches, his passion for orderly arrangements, his frequent references to ‘grey cells’. Dorothy L Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey could be, as I now am inclined to think, excruciatingly facetious. Nice Reggie Fortune said – and author H C Bailey had him say it very often – ‘My dear chap! Oh, my dear chap!’ and across the Atlantic there was Philo Vance, who spoke a strange language that his author, S S Van Dine, had the nerve to attribute, in part, to Balliol College, Oxford.

Faced with this assembly of celebrated eccentrics, I decided, on that long-distant wet afternoon, that my best chance lay in comparative normality: in the invention of a man with a background resembling that of the friends I had made in England, and that I had better not tie mannerisms, like labels, round his neck. (I can see now that with my earlier books I did not altogether succeed in this respect.)

I thought that my detective would be a professional policeman but, in some ways, atypical: an attractive, civilized man with whom it would be pleasant to talk but much less pleasant to fall out.

He began to solidify.

From the beginning I discovered that I knew quite a lot about him. Indeed, I rather think that, even if I had not fallen so casually into the practice of crime writing and had taken to a more serious form, he would still have arrived and found himself in an altogether different setting.

He was tall and thin with an accidental elegance about him and fastidious enough to make one wonder at his choice of profession. He was a compassionate man. He had a cockeyed sense of humour, dependent largely upon understatement, but for all his unemphatic, rather apologetic ways, he could be a formidable person of considerable authority. As for his background, that settled itself there and then: he was a younger son of a Buckinghamshire family and had his schooling at Eton. His elder brother, whom he regarded as a bit of an ass, was a diplomatist, and his mother, whom he liked, a lady of character.

I remember how pleased I was, early in his career, when one of the reviews called him ‘that nice chap, Alleyn’, because that was how I liked to think of him: a nice chap with more edge to him than met the eye – a good deal more, as I hope it has turned out. The popular press of his early days would refer to him as ‘the handsome inspector’, a practice that caused him acute embarrassment.

On this day of his inception I fiddled about with the idea of writing a tale that would explain why he left the Diplomatic Service for the Police Force, but somehow the idea has never jelled.

His age? Here I must digress. His age would defy the investigation of an Einstein, and he is not alone in this respect. Hercule Poirot, I have been told, was, by ordinary reckoning, going on 122 when he died. Truth to tell, fictional investigations move in an exclusive space-time continuum where Mr Bucket in Bleak House may be seen going about his police investigations cheek by jowl with the most recent fledglings. It is enough to say that on the afternoon of my detective’s arrival, I did not concern myself with his age, and I am still of the same mind in that respect.

His arrival had been unexpected and occurred, you might say, out of nothing. One of the questions writers are most often asked about characters in their books is whether they are based upon people in the workaday world – ‘real people’. Some of mine certainly are but they have gone through various mutations and in doing so have moved away from their original begetters. But not this one. He, as far as I can tell, had no begetter apart from his author. He came in without introduction and if, for this reason, there is an element of unreality about him, I can only say that for me, at least, he was and is very real indeed.

Dorothy L Sayers has been castigated, with some justification perhaps, for falling in love with her Wimsey. To have done so may have been an error in taste and judgment though her ardent fans would never have admitted as much. I can’t say I have ever succumbed in this way to my own investigator but I have grown to like him as an old friend. I even dare to think he has developed third-dimensionally in my company. We have travelled widely: in a night express through the North Island of New Zealand, and among the geysers, boiling mud and snow-clad mountains of that country. We have cruised along English canals and walked through the streets and monuments of Rome. His duties have taken us to an island off the coast of Normandy and to the backstage regions of several theatres. He has sailed with a psychopathic homicide from Tilbury to Cape Town and has made arrests in at least three country houses, one hospital, a church, a canal boat and a pub. Small wonder, perhaps, that we have both broadened our outlook under the pressure of these undertakings, none of which was anticipated on that wet afternoon in London.

At his first appearance he was a bachelor and, although responsive to the opposite sex, did not bounce in and out of irresponsible beds when going about his job. Or, if he did, I knew nothing about it. He was, to all intents and purposes, fancy-free and would remain so until, sailing out of Suva in Fiji, he came across Agatha Troy, painting in oils, on the boat deck of a liner. And that was still some half-dozen books in the future.

There would be consternation shown by editors and publishers when, after another couple of jobs, the lady accepted him. The acceptance would be a fait accompli, and from then on I would be dealing with a married investigator, his celebrated wife, and later on, their son.

By a series of coincidences and much against his inclination, it would come about that these two would occasionally get themselves embroiled in his professional duties, but generally speaking he would keep his job out of his family life. He would set about his cases with his regular associate, who is one of his closest friends; Inspector Fox, massive, calm, and plain-thinking, would tramp sedately in. They have been working together for a considerable time, and still allow me to accompany them.

But ‘on the afternoon in question,’ all this, as lady crime novelists used to say, ‘lay in the future.’ The fire had burnt clear and sent leaping patterns up the walls of my London flat when I turned on the light, opened an exercise book, sharpened my pencil, and began to write. There he was, waiting quietly in the background ready to make his entrance at Chapter IV, page 58, in the first edition.

I had company. It became necessary to give my visitor a name.

Earlier in that week I had visited Dulwich College. This is an English public school, which in any other country would mean a private school. It was founded and very richly endowed by a famous actor in the days of the first Elizabeth. It possesses a splendid picture gallery and a fabulous collection of relics from the Shakespearean-Marlovian theatre: enthralling to me who has a passion for that scene.

My father was an old boy of Dulwich College – an ‘old Alleynian’, as it is called, the name of the Elizabethan actor being Alleyn.

Detective-Inspector Alleyn, CID? Yes.

His first name was in doubt for some time, but another visit, this time to friends in the Highlands of Scotland, had familiarized me with some resoundingly-named characters, among them one Roderick (or Rory) MacDonald.