Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime (40 page)

Coming back to
Twelfth Night
after a break of nearly 20 years was refreshing. She found it ‘
lovely, delicate & haunting
’ and wondered how her rough-and-ready band of players would ‘shape up to it’. There were the usual hitches during rehearsal, and more. ‘Every kind of pest & hindrance besets us…illness,
non-arrival of essential properties, absenteeism owing to other obligations’, and Gerald Lascelles, her production assistant, had ‘stones in his waterworks’. ‘I suppose we shall muddle through.’ Ngaio wanted ‘Sticky’ Glue to play Sir Toby Belch, but he already had a major part in a review and could not rehearse properly until 18 days before opening night. ‘
I’m keeping my fingers
crossed for Mr [Fred] Betts,’ Ngaio told Lascelles in a note that accompanied get-well ‘grapes from Crawsie for her lovely young gentleman’.

The inaugural production of
Twelfth Night
at the Ngaio Marsh Theatre opened in June 1967. Betts did play Sir Toby; Robin Alborn was Orsino; Vincent Orange, Sir Andrew Aguecheek; Barry Empson, Malvolio; David Hindin, Feste; Judie Douglass, Olivia; and Annette Facer, Viola. This was Ngaio’s stable of players mixed with some emerging talent. Her formula for success combined experience with raw enthusiasm to bring both the dynamism and intellectual solidity of Shakespeare to life. The
Press
critic described the production as being like a full-bodied red wine, ‘
sometimes delicate
with a bouquet of romance, sometimes intoxicating with mirth’. Vincent Orange as Sir Andrew ‘elevated this silly sop to the peerage of clowns’; Fred Betts’s Sir Toby ‘kept the comedy driving forward’; Barry Empson’s Malvolio ‘had moments of inspired delight’; Judie Douglass’s Olivia ‘shone out like the rose she carried’; and Annette Facer ‘was clear and pert and feminine and boyish and all the things a girl dressed up as a boy should be’. The main criticisms were technical issues to do with the theatre and lighting. Beyond the formal criticism, there were rumblings that Ngaio sometimes over-used her stable.

After the production closed, Ngaio settled down to serious work on her novel
Clutch of Constables.
She was tackling a new structure. ‘
It’s all in flashback
from a lecture Alleyn’s giving to C.I.D. recruits & I can’t tell you what pitfalls lurk in that seemingly straightforward formula.’ She had more and more misgivings as she struggled on, but this was typical. The plot is, in fact, cleverly spliced with sections of Alleyn’s talk counterpoised with Troy’s involvement in the murder he is describing.
Clutch of Constables
is a pun, because the plot revolves around a gang of art forgers who are planning to plant a clutch of Constable paintings in the area where he painted, to be ‘discovered’ and sold for a fortune. The story is lulled along by the quiet rhythms of the river until the body of Miss Hazel Rickerby-Carrick is found tied to a weighted suitcase and floating. This novel achieves a retrospective telling of murder much more engagingly than
Died in the Wool.

Ngaio’s confidence in her work should have been bolstered by critical response to
Death at the Dolphin
when it was released in Britain in May that year. Collins Crime Club editor George Hardinge sent her a selection of reviews from leading newspapers. The book had gone down a treat. ‘
Of the several excellent
theatre stories she has written, I count this easily the best—a first rate book,’ wrote Edmund Crispin for
The Sunday Times.
Peter Philips for
The Sun
was effusive: ‘The first writer in the English language of the pure, classical, puzzle whodunit…Among the Crime Queens, Ngaio Marsh stands out as an Empress.’ The
Oxford Mail,
though, positioned what she was writing most accurately in the current climate of detective fiction writing: the novel ‘differs very little in treatment from the stories, which made her famous so many years ago. Yet there is nothing threadbare about it—rather, it has worn wonderfully well.’ In
Death at the Dolphin
Ngaio did what she did well, but it appealed to nostalgia rather than looked ahead. The new lead in detective fiction writing had been taken by a generation of writers that included figures like Ruth Rendell, and P.D. James, whose first novel,
Cover Her Face,
featuring Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard, was published in 1962. James’s books were set against the backdrop of Britain’s vast post-war bureaucracies, such as the criminal justice system and the health service. These were not cosily confined worlds where the ends were neatly tied up, but human zoos of power and corruption.

Ngaio remained determined to stay with the McIntoshes while they were in Rome, but
Clutch of Constables
needed to be ‘in the bag’ before she departed. She was still busy on the novel when she wrote to ask whether they would still be there in 1969. ‘
I long to come
, especially as I am quite remarkably fit.’ Ngaio was on a new diet: ‘breadless, butterless, potatoless & fatless’. She had lost 10 pounds.

But there was a blight on her wellbeing. Sylvia Fox had been in England for Ngaio’s investiture and had stayed on, arriving back in New Zealand in November. A week after her return she had been taken into hospital for an operation on her right breast. She had cancer. ‘
It’s been caught
in very good time & we pray all will be well.’ This was Sylvia’s second scare. In
1964
, she had developed an infected thyroid which the doctors would not say was not malignant until they saw it. She had a five-week course of pills and an operation, which was a success. Sylvia did not appreciate a fuss. A doctor’s daughter, she took her bouts of poor health in her stride. ‘
I do wish to heavens
she’d consult a quack,’ Ngaio had written in desperation to Doris McIntosh nearly a decade
earlier. Sylvia was ‘desperately tired & depressed’ and Ngaio suspected anaemia. ‘She’s not an easy person to help & retires into a scratchy reticence if one tries to help or suggest.’

At the beginning of 1968, Ngaio wrote ‘a hasty line’ to Doris McIntosh: ‘
I put my name down
for the 30 March sailing in the
Angelina
.’ The booking was made on an impulse after walking past the McIntoshes’ residence in Wellington. ‘[I] have yet to find out if I can afford this caper.’ Her plan was to go straight to Rome and stay with her friends, then tour Italy by hire-car for two weeks with Pamela Mann, then spend five weeks in London before sailing for New Zealand at the end of August. She had 12 weeks to put her house in order before she left for Rome. This meant a huge rush to finish the book and take care of last-minute details. ‘I’ve found tenants of a sort who will be nice to the cats.’ To her great relief, Sylvia was making good progress and ‘
being wonderful about
her beastly radium treatment. The after effects are really awful but should begin, now, to go off gradually.’

Then, just weeks before her departure, came the sad news that Nelly Rhodes had died, at the age of 72. ‘
It’s a body-blow
,’ Ngaio told Doris McIntosh. She found her friend’s death impossible to comprehend. ‘I think scarcely a day went by without my having some reminder or thought of her.’ For the first time in her life, Ngaio was leaving New Zealand and Nelly would not be at her journey’s end. ‘It’s difficult indeed to believe she won’t be there.’

B
arnaby Grant sits alone at an outdoor café in the Piazza Colonna, in Rome. Above him, a black, brooding sky booms across the traffic noise with the thunderous promise of rain. It is noon, and the café which pulsed with life just moments earlier, is deserted except for a table of three callused country yokels, a couple of young lovers, and an unkempt Englishman who hovers between tables and stares oddly at him. Grant reaches down to satisfy himself that his ‘locked attaché case’ is still there. ‘[It’s been] a bit of a swine, this one, he thought. It’s been a bit of a swine.’

Suddenly, as if the sluicegates of heaven have opened up, it begins to rain—just a handful of giant drops at first, but then a torrent that fills canopies in an instant and hits cars and the kerb so hard that it ricochets. Barnaby Grant leaps to his feet along with the others. There is a stampede, a collision, then a row between the three countrymen and the young lovers. Lightning flashes, thunder rolls, punches fly, and Grant emerges from the confusion stunned by a head-wound and with a nasty cut on his hand. He sits for a moment to recover, reaching habitually down for his comforter. There’s nothing there. His hand claws the space frantically. He can hardly bear to look.

Edmund Cork had often warned Ngaio not to keep just a single handwritten
copy of her novel; in
When in Rome
Barnaby Grant has done just this. This is writer’s paranoia come to life. The sensation for Grant is like that of drowning, a powerless sinking into sensory nothingness. ‘An impossible flood of thoughts crowded his brain…for instance, of how long it had taken him to write his book, of his knowledge that undoubtedly it was the best thing he had done, perhaps would ever do.’ He is numb with desolation, but lingering will not bring it back, and reporting it to the British Consulate might.
‘Blackmail’
is the consul’s declaration. Then he corrects himself: perhaps ‘Ransom’ is a better word.

So the agonizing wait for a telephone call begins. On the third morning, a heatwave hits Rome. Barnaby Grant sits alone in the breathless shade of a hotel roof garden with his ‘uneaten brioche, a pot of honey and three wasps’. He has been in a state of anxious exhaustion, and is now in ‘a condition that he supposed must be that of Despair itself.’ Then he vaguely realizes that the waiter is gesturing towards the door. Through it and onto the roof walks Sebastian Mailer, the enigmatic Englishman whom Grant had seen three days earlier at the café. As he moves towards the shade, the man draws an attaché case from under his jacket. ‘I think you will be pleased to see me.’

Barnaby Grant returns to England and publishes his novel,
Simon in Latium,
to the acclaim he anticipated. It crowns a career which had had a rocky beginning. One of his early novels was very similar to someone else’s. There were accusations of plagiarism, then a court case. He withdrew the book from sale himself. This was another writer’s neurosis. Ngaio said that one of the reasons she never read detective fiction was that she was too frightened of discovering in print either the quintessence of the novel she was about to write or the one she had just written. Grant has lived in the shadow of public humiliation, even though he has long since become an internationally celebrated author. Less than a year later, he is back in Rome and, while sitting in the foyer of a hotel, he happens to see Sebastian Mailer standing at the reception desk, making arrangements for his tour party. Overtaken by a sense of repugnance, Grant hides behind his newspaper and escapes onto the street, where a battle ensues between his conscience and his instinct for self-preservation. His conscience wins and he returns to the foyer to thank Mailer once more for saving his novel.

If only his instincts had fought harder. Mailer ushers him into a private room where he threatens to expose him as a plagiarist. In the three days he kept Grant’s novel, Mailing had written a novella with a similar theme, which he showed to people at the time claiming it was his own. He now tells Grant he will go to
the press and say that the famous novelist has stolen his work. From this point he begins blackmailing the writer. His first request seems innocent enough: Barnaby Grant is to be the main attraction of II Cicerone, a tour company Mailer has developed to fleece rich tourists.

Mailer is also a suspected drug boss in an international heroin and cocaine smuggling ring, which uses the route from ‘Izmir [in Turkey] via Sicily to Marseilles and thence, through France or entirely by sea, to the U.S.A.’. Roderick Alleyn is tailing Mailer, and this is why he is on hand to take Mailer’s tour of San Tommaso’s in Pallaria. The party consists of wealthy Barnaby Grant fans, Alleyn incognito, plus Mailer and his Italian drivers. Down, down into the bowels of Rome’s history they descend, until they reach the pagan remains that feature so ‘vividly in Grant’s novel’. This is the excavated remnant of a pagan house where the god Mithras was worshipped. There is a shrine with a statue of the god still in place.

Enthralled, Baroness Van der Veghel begs Barnaby Grant to explain the secrets of the cult and its setting. Grant casts a dagger-look at Mailer before suggesting, ‘confusedly, that an author seldom reproduced in scrupulous detail, an actual
mise-en-scèe
any more than he used unadulterated human material. “I don’t mean I didn’t start off with San Tommaso…Of course I did. But I gave it another name and altered it to my purpose.”’

Barnaby Grant is reluctant to talk the writers’ shop that Ngaio readily discussed with Doris McIntosh as she worked on the manuscript for
When in Rome
after she returned from her Italian trip. ‘
It will be clear enough
that my S. Tommaso is based on S. Clemente,’ she explained, ‘but as you will see there are very wide divergences in architecture, lay-out etc.’ Ngaio received her knowledge of heroin trafficking from Edmund Cork: ‘my London agent got the gen for me’. Toni’s drug den, where marijuana and hard drugs are supplied like soft drinks, was her own invention. ‘
I’ve had no prompting
about drug pads & very likely have gone hopelessly off the beam.’ Doris McIntosh helped Ngaio with the Roman police hierarchy. ‘
[I] would be profoundly grateful
for any stray gems that might trickle from your pen under the general heading of Roman Police Force.’ Doris responded by sending Ngaio a comprehensive list. ‘
What an angel-child
you are & what a superb resumé’. Doris also assisted Ngaio with the spelling of Italian words. As things got progressively more difficult to explain by letter, Doris suggested Ngaio send over a typed transcript so that she and Alister could proofread the Italian properly and check for inaccuracies.

Ngaio’s publishers were ‘rampant’ for the manuscript. In the timeframe available, she could only supply a heavily annotated and changed carbon copy. This was sent and returned by airmail at vast expense, in just enough time for Ngaio to make the McIntoshes’ amendments to the galley proofs. Even then, there were last-minute queries. ‘
I note that DEPUTI
-QUESTURI is now to be VICE-QUESTORE—Change in spelling, O.K.?’ Ngaio always worked hard to get the facts in her fiction correct. It was in her nature to do so, but if she failed her publisher received a barrage of mail correcting the fault. In
Final Curtain,
she used the ‘trade-mark word’ Thermos as a noun with a small ‘t’ and received a stiff note from the manufacturer reminding her of the mistake.
When in Rome
was a minefield of potential hazards. ‘
I don’t want Alleyn
involved with any more Italians!’

The art historical and architectural references in
When in Rome
came from Ngaio’s experiences on her trip, and so, interestingly ,did the central clue that exposes the murder of Mailer and his estranged Sicilian wife, Violetta. One of Ngaio’s key problems in writing the book was ‘
achieving structural
union of Antiquities & story-line’. The linking needed to be seamless to avoid it becoming ‘a sort of bastard thriller-guide’. Ngaio began collecting her Rome experiences when she arrived at the McIntoshes’ apartment in the Via de San Pantaleo in early May 1968. Before leaving New Zealand, she had had her first bout ‘
of all filthy complaints
gout!’—in her left foot. ‘It now resembles a red-hot pumpkin stabbed by white-hot knitting needles.’ The gout settled before her departure, but she sometimes needed the support of a stick. Ngaio’s stay at the embassy was unforgettable. Her five weeks in Rome was ‘
the experience of a lifetime
,’ she told Gerald Lascelles, ‘& I still can’t get over my luck in seeing it under such wonderful guidance & in such almost indecent luxury’. They had a driver to take them ‘hither & thither’ and the Pantaleo was just half a minute’s walk from the piazza that Ngaio thought the loveliest in Rome.

‘
I am sitting on a balcony
of a palazzo in Old Rome surrounded by the facades of other houses,’ Ngaio wrote to Annette Facer. The houses near the Pantaleo were ochre-and terracotta-coloured, and some of them were very poor. People sang as they hung their washing out on balconies. ‘The beauty & excitement & sheer warmth of the place is indescribable.’ Ngaio and Doris McIntosh spent days in leisurely sightseeing, sitting beside fountains and at kerbside cafés and drinking in the city’s enchantment. At night they wandered down ancient alleyways and through darkened streets, and one evening spent hours driving round just
looking at the stunning lights. Ngaio was struck by the Colosseum, lit from inside. It seemed so alive she could almost hear the lions roar ‘
& the multitude
roaring still louder’. They saw a wealth of magnificent sculpture—‘I like the pagan & especially the Etruscan things best’—and among the architectural treasures the Basilica di San Clemente, where second-century worshippers built a temple to their god Mithras. Ngaio stored her impressions. ‘
Have you any idea
how deep down the Mithraic house is at S. Clemente?’ she enquired of Doris McIntosh after she returned to New Zealand.

When Pamela Mann arrived to pick Ngaio up for their road trip, ‘
I came away
almost but not quite muttering with Macbeth: “No more sights”.’ The McIntoshes and driver Marcello escorted their hire-car to the edge of town and said farewell. The traffic was frightening, and there was nothing for it but complete immersion. ‘
Pammy is now
a wizard at the wheel,’ Ngaio reported. ‘I no longer push out the floor boards which I must confess I was doing pretty vehemently in Rome.’ Together they toured northern Italy, visiting Perugia, Assisi and Florence. At dusk, they walked along Perugia’s ancient ramparts and ‘looked across the Umbrian hills & plains towards Assisi’. There they were treated to Quattrocento painting and sculpture, ‘
my greatest delight
’, and ‘went into the mountains to St Francis’s little grotto which I found very touching’; and in Florence to ‘the “unfinished” Michelangelo’s. Also the Donatello David.’ At Fiesole they found a ‘retrospective season’ of the film director Michelangelo Antonioni playing in the ruins of the Romano theatre, and when they dined at Mario’s, Antonioni was at the next table. ‘Great thrill for Pammy whose programme he autographed.’ They arrived back in Florence by bus at one o’clock in the morning and walked to their hotel. The shady roof garden of their Pension Hermitage in Florence suggested the setting where Barnaby Grant sits in despair over his missing manuscript.

At the end of June, they took the train from Viareggio to Geno and then on to Paris, which was still in political turmoil after the student riots of May 1968. It was ironic that Ngaio was there at the very time when the intellectual unrest behind the writing of Roland Barthes’ essay, ‘The Death of the Author’ (1968), with its Post-Structuralist implications, was being felt. This essay underpinned a shift in thinking that would have an impact on a new generation. What it promoted was the very antithesis of Golden Age detective fiction, where authors became serialized celebrities writing about male heroes, in closed worlds with absolute values and a universal truth.

Barthes challenged the author’s authority to dictate an ultimate meaning
of a text. He argued that language was so complex and the author’s mind so unknowable that a single meaning was a Western bourgeois delusion. This viewpoint enfranchised the reader, because meaning was not implicit in the text, but in people’s diverse readings of it. This perspective embraced flux, ambiguity, change, cultural and sexual diversity, and multiple realities and truths. More than just a student riot, May 1968 represented a revolution in cultural and social thinking that sealed a watertight door in history, making what came before it seem outmoded. Ngaio observed the stand-off between students and the authorities, just as her characters do in
When in Rome:

In the street a smallish group of young men carrying a few inflammatory placards shouted one or two insults. A group of police, gorgeously arrayed, pinched out their cigarettes and moved towards the demonstrators who cat-called and bolted a short way down the street.

Superficially it seemed that control had been reasserted, but the long-term impact of intellectual and political unrest could not be anticipated.

When she reached London, Ngaio was lucky to have the use of her secretary Joan Pullen’s flat while Joan was away on a Mediterranean cruise. Her first weeks of a brief stay were taken up ‘with publishers, agents & solicitors’. Her
Clutch of Constables
was expected to do well, and the publishers wanted her there for the promotion so they advanced the release date. She stayed briefly with Billy Collins in Kent, caught up with ‘my three boys in the theatre’—Elric Hooper, Jonathan Elsom and James Laurenson—and with ‘
my dear, dear, family
…They all miss their mama very grievously & wanted to talk over
very
many things.’ She saw all but one of the Rhodes children, and found it more difficult than ever to leave after just five weeks. ‘The old London enchantment is hard at it.’

She could not explain why she bothered to return home, but she did and, shockingly, it was without many of her precious Italian photographs. Harrod’s had sent her slides back to Italy to be processed and they were lost. ‘
It’s absolutely maddening
…Can you beat it,’ she exclaimed to Doris McIntosh. She stewed over her losses and decided to put them to work by using photographic prints as the clue to expose her murderer in
When in Rome.