Black Beech and Honeydew (39 page)

In old age one begins to consider these matters. One hesitates to speak of death to one’s friends for fear of making them feel awkward. There is something a little
farouche
in being ‘on’ about one’s own demise. Luckily in this, as in so many other respects, there is always Shakespeare. He says it all.

People sometimes remark on the gruesomeness of some of the murders in my earlier books and are inclined to take the line of wondering how a nice old dear like me could dream up such beastliness, let alone write about it. The idea being, I fancy, that perhaps the old
dear is not so nice after all. I really have no answer to this unless it be the one I gave to the soldier at the Brains Trust, ‘Perhaps it’s a substitute for committing crimes myself’ but, with the deepest respect to the psychiatrists, I really don’t think I’m sublimating any bloody inclinations lurking in my unconscious or id or libido or whatever it is and if that’s the right way of putting it. I am, in fact, extremely squeamish and cannot read accounts of physical torture or cruelty to animals or humans without reacting most unhappily. True, in
Photo-Finish
a snapshot is skewered to a corpse but at least the victim was already dead when this indignity was inflicted.

And here, it occurs to me, is the place to confess that for some time now, I have seldom read crime fiction except when it was written by Wilkie Collins or, unresolvedly, Charles Dickens. Or, of course, when I have been asked to contribute a blurb for a bookjacket. I don’t know why this abstinence has occurred; perhaps the pursuit of other writers’ achievements became too much like a busman’s holiday. Or perhaps I live too far away from my brothers and sisters in crime. In England it was a great adventure to get together with them at Crime Writers’ festivities and to talk about the craft. Particularly was this so with Julian Symons and Harry Keating, joint victims with me on those Midlands tours when we paid for our literary luncheons with our tongues. Julian is, of course, the doyen of the genre, and compulsive reading for all practitioners.
Bloody Murder
is the last word in critical appraisal. Harry’s Inspector Ghote is always an enchanting read. Yet, if his creator and I had not met I don’t expect I would have made the Inspector’s acquaintance and thereby would have missed a great treat.

In my early days when I was still rather bemused by growing success as a writer and found it difficult to believe in it, I was invited, with my agent, Edmund Cork, to an initiation ceremony held by the Detection Club. Because of my isolation down-under I could not be considered as a possible member. There was a rule that a certain number of attendances at meetings every year must be observed. So it was very kind indeed of them to invite us to their party.

We dined, grandly, at the Dorchester and then retired to a private room where, or so it now seems to me, the only pieces of furniture were a lectern and two chairs against the wall. Edmund and I were placed in these, hard by the lectern.

This was before the Second World War and the Golden Age of the detective novel, as it is sometimes called, still flourished. The members present that I can remember were Dorothy Sayers, John Rhode, Freeman Wills Croft and Anthony Gilbert (who is a lady). Agatha Christie was a founder-member but was not there that night. E. C. Bentley, the extremely skilled writer of the classic
Trent’s Last Case,
was to be initiated. To me, in the insolence of comparative youth, they all seemed to be elderly.

Everybody except Edmund and I left the room. I am sorry to say that in the deathly silence that attended our isolation we became very slightly hysterical but, so far, in control of ourselves. We spoke, I seem to remember, in whispers as if we were in church.

The door at the far end of the room opened and Miss Sayers entered, now kitted out in full academic regalia. She mounted the lectern and was near enough, if one had ventured, to be touched. I was dismayed to see that in the folds of her gown she secreted a side-arm – a pistol or revolver or six-shooter.

She was followed by the rest of the company. There were Wardens. The Warden of the Naked Blade (Freeman Wills Croft, I fancy) with a drawn sword. The Warden of the Hollow Skull, or perhaps I should say ‘Death’s Head’, which was carried on a cushion by John Rhode and by a quaint device could be made to light up from within, and the Warden of the Lethal Phial (Anthony Gilbert) with a baleful little bottle. I am sorry if with the passage of so many years I have got objects and bearers mixed up. In their midst, looking shy, came E. C. Bentley. He was placed before Miss Sayers who now administered a long, complicated and very classy oath written by someone high up in the crime-writing hierarchy. (Could it have been Father Ronald Knox?) It was all about not concealing clues or making a policeman a murderer or (could it be?) having a Chinese character or arrow poison in one’s book but I do not remember all the things one mustn’t do. It was very impressive and beautifully phrased.

Mr Bentley took the oath, John Rhode switched on the Skull, Freeman Wills Croft, who looked like a highly respected family solicitor, rather gingerly flourished the Sword, Anthony Gilbert displayed the Phial and Miss Sayers, taking Edmund and me completely off our guard, loosed off her gun. The noise was deafening. I think I let
out a yelp and I am sorry to record that dear Edmund, who has a loud laugh, laughed excessively.

The ceremony completed, we all went to the Detection Club’s rooms in Soho and in great awe I heard them speak rudely about their publishers. A year or two later, on another visit, Miss Sayers asked me to dine with her and see them perform a skit on the Sherlock Holmes stories in which she was Mrs Hudson and I think Watson dunnit.

I am now a member of the Detection Club. Very kindly they waived their rule about regular attendances. They have, in some sort, been supplanted by the much bigger Crime Writers’ Association which organizes trips abroad, presents awards and arranges for high-up policemen, pathologists, medical jurisprudents and all sorts of exciting authorities to address them. It would be lovely to go to these splendid parties.

It was some time after the adventure at the Dorchester that I first met Agatha Christie. She was kind and encouraging and struck one as being shy. I suppose it could be said that she was also an enigmatic person, since the mystery of her disappearance for some days during an unhappy episode in her past has been so often revived and, after her death, was actually used as subject matter for a book and film. We met several times and I like to remember those meetings. Nowadays, especially in America, a sort of ‘thing’ goes on about whether or not I have stepped into her shoes. I don’t think I have and I wish it wouldn’t. I don’t think that, beyond the fact that we are both crime writers, we have technically very much in common. She is the absolute tops in plotting. Her books are at the apex of the classic style of detective fiction. A puzzle is set up and a contest between author and reader carried through to a surprise ending. She, almost always, is the winner. Her characters are two-dimensional, lively, extremely well-defined and highly entertaining. To call them silhouettes is not to dispraise them. (After all, what’s wrong with the silhouette of a hawk-faced man in a deerstalker hat and an Inverness cape?) You may say that in form and style Agatha Christie is a purist.

I, on the other hand, try to write about characters in the round and am in danger of letting them take charge. Continually I have to pull myself together and attend to the plotting and remind myself
that this is a detective story and I’d better not start fancying myself in other directions.

Two years ago the Mystery Writers of America made me a Grand Master of their Society. (I expect they feel that Grand
Mistress
might be a bit equivocal – a little too suggestive of a
maîtresse-en-chef.)
John Ball who, as well as being a crime writer himself, has a successful film to his credit, was in New Zealand and invited me to attend the award-giving dinner in Los Angeles at which I would receive a china bust of Edgar Allan Poe. Unhappily I was not able to accept this very kind invitation even though Mr Ball wooed me with offers of a pavilion in his garden where I would be able to sit rather like an oversized plaster gnome and write. And so, to coin a phrase, Poe was posted. I look up at this moment and there, to my pride, he stands:
stylisé,
corpse-like, sheet-white, with closed eyes and black moustache, and there, fused into his pediment, is my name and the date, 1978. An uninformed person might make the silly mistake of supposing him thus labelled, to be me. I was very much touched by this handsome compliment.

I have been looking through the earlier chapters of this book and particularly at the concluding ones written some eighteen years ago. So many of the friends who appear in them can now only do so as memories. One has moved up into the front rank and the figures thin out. Jemima most sadly of all. Charlot. Bob.

And that Micawber-like voice no longer booms. In his last letter to me Mr Wilkie quoted the gravedigger’s song: ‘Age, with his stealing steps.’

There are now three Lampreys instead of five. I keep quite closely in touch with them. The most preposterous calamities, as well as very serious ones, continue to befall them. I wish we didn’t live half the world away from each other but there, that’s the way things have fallen out and with every letter I seem to hear those unmistakeable voices hailing me from the Kentish hills above West Malling or from somewhere on the fringes of the Devon moorlands or above the remotest Highland coastline or inland from Perth in Western Australia.

With the Lampreys is linked my cousin Johnnie Dacres-Mannings, the erstwhile gunner who, after a severe spell of tuberculosis which put an end to his term as a soldier, is now a most happily married papa and a successful figure in the world of finance in Australia and who, when I fly across the Tasman Sea to visit them, patiently tries to explain the, to me, totally inexplicable mysteries of high-powered banking. My understanding of money matters is on a par with Mr Micawber’s but less disastrous as I have a compensatory horror of spending more than I can earn. For the rest I am content to leave it all to experts, which seems to keep them pretty busy.

Johnnie’s eldest son, Nicholas, who is my godson, has just returned from England where he spent a year at Marlborough, rounding off his schooling. He was the same age as his father was when he first came down from the North Island to Christ’s College. I am delighted to hear that Nicholas became warmly attached to the Lampreys with whom he spent his holidays and whose far from Establishment on-goings and punctual crises he seems to have taken happily in his stride. He and his papa are visiting me in the New Year which will be a treat of treats.

And now I look further back almost to where those lines of perspective meet and there are the tents in the bush at Glentui. When I was in England I visited Aileen, the eldest and last of the Burtons. Now a widow and living at Berkhamsted, she described herself as ‘The Ancient of Days’. She got out an album of photographs with dry disintegrating fronds of New Zealand fern stuck between them. We turned the pages and, as old people will, became nostalgic, looked backwards over half a century and, for a moment or two saw ourselves as if it were yesterday. There we all were: the four Burton sisters, Sylvia, Mivvy, my parents, the two young parsons and the bearded boys. Back come the multiple voices of the river, of night-owls and of bellbirds at first light: the smells of woodsmoke, of sun-warmed canvas, frying bacon and cold, wet moss. ‘Lovely holidays,’ we said, ‘they were lovely holidays.’

A pinch of friable leaf-dust had lodged between the pages.

It might have fallen from a black beech tree that on a warm morning in the foothills of the Southern Alps sweated little globules of honeydew.

A Man Lay Dead,
London, Bles, 1934.

Enter a Murderer,
London, Bles, 1935.

The Nursing Home Murder,
with Henry Jellett, London, Bles, 1935.

Death in Ecstasy,
London, Bles, 1936.

Vintage Murder,
London, Bles, 1937.

Artists in Crime,
London, Bles, 1938.

Death in a White Tie,
London, Bles, 1938.

Overture to Death,
London, Collins, 1939.

Death at the Bar,
London, Collins, 1940.

Surfeit of Lampreys,
London, Collins, 1940; US title:
Death of a Peer.

Death and the Dancing Footman,
London, Collins, 1942.

Colour Scheme,
London, Collins, 1943.

Died in the Wool,
London, Collins, 1945.

Final Curtain,
London, Collins, 1947.

Swing, Brother, Swing,
London, Collins, 1949; US title:
A Wreath for Riviera.

Opening Night,
London, Collins, 1951; US title:
Night of the Vulcan.

Spinsters in Jeopardy,
London, Collins, 1954; US title:
The Bride of Death.

Scales of Justice,
London, Collins, 1955.

Off With His Head,
London, Collins, 1957; US title:
Death of a Fool.

Singing in the Shrouds,
London, Collins, 1959.

False Scent,
London, Collins, 1960.

Hand in Glove,
London, Collins, 1962.

Dead Water,
London, Collins, 1964.

Black Beech and Honeydew: An Autobiography,
London, Collins, 1966; revised edition, Auckland, Collins, 1981; London, Collins, 1982.

Death at the Dolphin,
London, Collins, 1967; US title:
Killer Dolphin.

Clutch of Constables,
London, Collins, 1968.

When in Rome,
London, Collins, 1970.

Tied up in Tinsel,
London, Collins, 1972.

Black As He’s Painted,
London, Collins, 1974.

Last Ditch,
London, Collins, 1977.

Grave Mistake,
London, Collins, 1978.

Photo-Finish,
London, Collins, 1980.

Light Thickens,
London, Collins, 1982.

Death on the Air and Other Stories,
London, HarperCollins, 1995; US title:
The Collected Short Fiction of Ngaio Marsh.