Ngaio Marsh


Dame Edith Ngaio Marsh was a New Zealand crime writer and theatre director. She was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1966.
Marsh is known as one of the "Queens of Crime", along with Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Margery Allingham. She is known primarily for her character Inspector Roderick Alleyn, a gentleman detective who works for the Metropolitan Police.
The Ngaio Marsh Award is awarded annually for the best New Zealand mystery, crime and thriller fiction writing.

Youth

Marsh was born in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand, where she also died. The origin of the name "Ngaio" is a Maori word which is the name of a flowering tree and also the name of an insect found in New Zealand. Her father neglected to register her birth until 1900 and there is some uncertainty about the date. She was the only child of Rose and bank clerk Henry Marsh, described by Marsh as "have-nots". Her mother's sister Ruth married the geologist, lecturer, and curator Robert Speight. Ngaio Marsh was educated at St Margaret's College in Christchurch, where she was one of the first students when the school was founded. She studied painting at the Canterbury College School of Art before joining the Allan Wilkie company as an actress in 1916 and touring New Zealand. For a short time in 1921 she joined the Rosemary Rees English Comedy Company, a touring company formed by actor-manager Rosemary Rees. From 1928 she divided her time between living in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. From 1928 to 1932 she operated an interior decorating business in Knightsbridge, London.
Marsh was a member of The Group, an art association based in Christchurch, New Zealand. She exhibited with them in 1927; 1928; 1935; 1936; 1938; 1940; 1947.

Career

Internationally she is best known for her 32 detective novels published between 1934 and 1982. Along with Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Agatha Christie, she has been classed as one of the four original "Queens of Crime" — female writers who dominated the genre of crime fiction in the Golden Age of the 1920s and 1930s.
All her novels feature British CID detective Roderick Alleyn. Several novels feature Marsh's other loves, the theatre and painting. A number are set around theatrical productions, and three others are about actors off stage. Her short story "'I Can Find My Way Out" is also set around a theatrical production and is the earlier "Jupiter case" referred to in Opening Night; the short story won third prize in 1946 in the inaugural short story contest of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Alleyn marries a painter, Agatha Troy, whom he meets during an investigation, and who features in three later novels.
Most of the novels are set in England, but four are set in New Zealand, with Alleyn either on secondment to the New Zealand police or on holiday ; Surfeit of Lampreys begins in New Zealand but continues in London.
In 2018, HarperCollins Publishers released Money in the Morgue by Ngaio Marsh and Stella Duffy. The book was started by Marsh during World War II but abandoned. Working with just the book's title, first three chapters and some notes—but no idea of the plot or motive of the villain—Duffy completed the novel.

Theatre

Marsh's great passion was the theatre. In 1942 she produced a modern-dress Hamlet for the Canterbury University College Drama Society, the first of many Shakespearean productions with the society until 1969. In 1944, Hamlet and a production of Othello toured a theatre-starved New Zealand to rapturous acclaim. In 1949, assisted by entrepreneur Dan O'Connor, her student players toured Australia with a new version of Othello and Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. In the 1950s she was involved with the New Zealand Players, a relatively short-lived national professional touring repertory company. In 1972 she was invited by the Christchurch City Council to direct Shakespeare's Henry V, the inaugural production for the opening of the newly constructed James Hay Theatre in Christchurch; she made the unusual choice of casting two male leads, who alternated on different nights.
She lived to see New Zealand set up with a viable professional theatre industry with realistic Arts Council support, with many of her protégés to the forefront. The 430-seat Ngaio Marsh Theatre at the University of Canterbury is named in her honour.

Museum

Her home in Cashmere, a suburb of Christchurch, on the northern slopes of the Port Hills is preserved as a museum.

Awards and honours

Marsh was unofficially engaged to Edward Bristed, who died in action in December 1917. She never married and had no children. She enjoyed close companionships with women, including her lifelong friend Sylvia Fox, but denied being lesbian, according to biographer Joanne Drayton.
"I think Ngaio Marsh wanted the freedom of being who she was in a world, especially in a New Zealand that was still very conformist in its judgments of what constituted 'decent jokers, good Sheilas, and 'weirdos'", Roy Vaughan wrote after meeting her on a P&O Liner. In 1965 she published an autobiography, Black Beech and Honeydew. British author and publisher Margaret Lewis wrote an authorized biography, Ngaio Marsh, A Life in 1991. New Zealand art historian Joanne Drayton's biography, Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime was published in 2008. Towards the end of her life she systematically destroyed many of her papers, letters, documents and handwritten manuscripts.
Marsh died in Christchurch and was buried at the Church of the Holy Innocents, Mount Peel.

Detective novels

All 32 novels feature Chief Inspector Alleyn of the Criminal Investigation Department, Metropolitan Police. The series is chronological: published and probably written in order of the fictional history.
  1. A Man Lay Dead
  2. Enter a Murderer
  3. The Nursing Home Murder
  4. Death in Ecstasy
  5. Vintage Murder. Marsh's working title was The Case of the Greenstone Tiki
  6. Artists in Crime
  7. Death in a White Tie
  8. Overture to Death
  9. Death at the Bar
  10. Surfeit of Lampreys ; Death of a Peer in the U.S.
  11. Death and the Dancing Footman
  12. Colour Scheme
  13. Died in the Wool. Serialised: Wagga Wagga Daily Advertiser
  14. Money in the Morgue
  15. Final Curtain
  16. Swing Brother Swing ; A Wreath for Rivera in the U.S.. Serialised: Home Magazine
  17. Opening Night ; Night at the Vulcan in the U.S. Serialised: Woman's Day
  18. Spinsters in Jeopardy ; abridged later in the U.S. as The Bride of Death
  19. Scales of Justice. Serialised: Australian Women's Weekly
  20. Off With His Head ; Death of a Fool in the U.S.
  21. Singing in the Shrouds. Serialised: Australian Women's Weekly
  22. False Scent. Serialised: Australian Women's Weekly
  23. Hand in Glove
  24. Dead Water
  25. Death at the Dolphin ; Killer Dolphin in the U.S.
  26. Clutch of Constables
  27. When in Rome
  28. Tied Up in Tinsel
  29. Black As He's Painted
  30. Last Ditch
  31. Grave Mistake
  32. Photo Finish
  33. Light Thickens

    Biographical

Two novels were adapted as television episodes in the 1960s; Death in Ecstasy in 1964 with Geoffrey Keen as Alleyn, and Artists in Crime in 1968 with Michael Allinson as Alleyn.
Four of the Alleyn novels were adapted for television in New Zealand and aired there in 1977 under the title Ngaio Marsh Theatre, with George Baker as Alleyn. Marsh appears in a cameo in the episode "Vintage Murder."
Nine were adapted as The Inspector Alleyn Mysteries and aired by the BBC in 1993 and 1994, with Simon Williams and then Patrick Malahide as Alleyn.
In the 1990s the BBC made radio adaptations of Surfeit of Lampreys, A Man Lay Dead, Opening Night, and When in Rome starring Jeremy Clyde as Inspector Alleyn.
Ngaio Marsh co-wrote the 1951 episode Night at the Vulcan of the Philco Television Playhouse; and appeared as herself in the sixth episode The Central Problem in a television series of the unfinished Charles Dickens mystery novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood