Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime (46 page)

The physical jolt of her fall possibly precipitated Ngaio’s next bout of illness, because not long after this she was back in Princess Margaret Hospital. Sylvia Fox wrote a reassuring note to Doris McIntosh: ‘
Ngaio has a delightful room
& every care & attention. She likes Mr [David] Hay her heart man very much.’ Ngaio was in considerable pain with her leg, and was expected to be in hospital at least another two weeks. Once again, it was a combination of thrombosis, heart problems and getting the balance of her medicine right. She was back home towards the end of May and ‘ploughing’ through the English proofs for
Grave Mistake.

She was encouraged in this laborious task by the thrilling news that, along with Daphne du Maurier, she had been awarded one of crime fiction’s highest awards. Elizabeth Walter wrote to her in March 1978: ‘
Many congratulations
from us all on becoming a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America—an honour which I am sure is long overdue.’ Ngaio was invited to collect her prize, a ceramic bust of Edgar Allan Poe, at an awards dinner in Los Angeles, but poor health made travel impossible so she received it by post. The recognition spurred her on to produce her last books under gruelling circumstances.

On both sides of the Atlantic, her publishers thought
Grave Mistake
lacked a convincing motive for the murder. ‘
I feel this is probably
a case of you as a writer knowing exactly why,’ wrote Collins’s Robert Knittel, ‘but having inadvertently forgotten that the poor reader doesn’t have your inside knowledge.’ Ngaio’s response was less diplomatic and closer to the truth. She knew there were problems, but thought the trouble stemmed from the fact that the book had ‘
been interrupted so often
by illness’. ‘
[It] hung round my neck
like the Ancient Mariner’s Albatross,’ she admitted to Edmund Cork. Apart from the technical problems,
Grave Mistake
was an old English cosy with the thinnest new paint job. What worked best were the parts written from experiences closest to Ngaio’s heart. ‘
Obviously there is more
than a nodding acquaintanceship between Upper Quintern & Birling,’ she wrote to Maureen and John Balfour. Her descriptions of the village of Upper Quintern were richly evocative, her night scenes written as freshly as if she were stepping out again into that crystal-clear Christmas Eve.

Elizabeth Walter congratulated Ngaio on the cleverly drawn character of Verity Preston, and on the unrequited sexual static between her and suitor Nikolas Markos. ‘
They linger in my mind
in the way that the best characters in a book so often do,’ she wrote. Walter thought Ngaio had made a wise choice in leaving Verity and Nikolas buzzing but unbedded. Verity is a successful West End playwright. At the time of the murder ‘she was engaged in making extremely tricky alterations to the last act of a play which, after a promising try-out in the provinces, had attracted nibbles from a London management’. This was what Ngaio had wanted first for
False Scent, Singing in the Shrouds
and then
When in Rome,
but her stage plays remained in the provinces. Ngaio could make it happen in fiction, however, where the destiny of a play was in the hands of the author, not a fickle English theatre management. Ngaio increased the murderer’s share of the will, made his relationship with the victim knotty, and resubmitted the manuscript, with a dedication to criminal lawyer Gerald Lascelles.

For many in Christchurch, Lascelles was as mysterious and intriguing as one of Ngaio’s characters. He moved in cultural circles that were theatrical and musical and therefore often fringe and bohemian, and his work as a barrister involved dealings with shady criminal characters; in conservative and suspicious Christchurch, rumours circulated. Ngaio was a fierce supporter of friends, and Gerald Lascelles was one of her best. Her dedication to him was as much a statement of solidarity as of thanks.

She had ‘trudged through’ proofs unwell and with reduced eyesight, so the outcome was cause for celebration. ‘
Grave Mistake
seems to be beating
all records in the U.S.A.,’ she wrote to Maureen Balfour the following year. ‘It has sold 22,000 copies…& [is] still going strong.’ The book was also taken up by the English and American Mystery Guilds, which delighted both Collins and Little, Brown—and Ngaio. Her Golden Age detective fiction had a momentum that was still going strong.

Success would have been sweeter, though, if not for family worries. Stella Mannings’s second husband, after just four years together, had a series of life-threatening strokes, and she was ‘very sad’ to hear that Jean’s second husband had died. Ngaio had helped pay for Jean’s son to go to school and was distressed to think the family might be disrupted by tragedy again. Both women took respite stays with Ngaio. There was also the disturbing news that Bruce Mason had been diagnosed with cancer. Her generation was suffering, and every good moment must be cherished.

In August, Doris McIntosh sent Ngaio and Sylvia two dozen mussels. They replied in a joint thank-you note; Ngaio’s contribution is in italics:

We write
to thank you
jointly
for a luncheon
binge
the like of which
has never been
surpassed
or indeed equalled.
Firstly, soup
made by
Syl
of unparalleled
richness.
Next, with
brown bread & butter.
With these,
a light lager.
Being now,
up to our gunwales
& incapable
of more
we close
this effusion
repeating over [sic] warmest
& fullest and most grateful thanks
& blessings.
Sylvia
Ngaio

Ngaio and Sylvia did things as a couple. They entertained, often had
Anita Muling and Marjorie Chambers
over for lunch or dinner, and their favourite pastimes were going out to films, the theatre or concerts. Sylvia drove at night
so that Ngaio would not be housebound with her cataract.

They became stalwarts of the Court Theatre. Ngaio was particularly thrilled with Elric Hooper’s directorship, and his work was a draw for them both. In private she called him the ‘infant phenomenon’, and thought of him as, at times, difficult and demanding, but brilliantly talented. She believed he had ‘
lifted the level
of The Court out of all sight’. It was something she had desperately wanted to do herself, but she was generous enough to recognize, and delight in, the achievement of another.

Hooper’s success at the Court was part of a blossoming of professional theatre companies in New Zealand. The demise in 1960 of Richard and Edith Campion’s touring New Zealand Players had proved that the cost of moving a professional company around the country was prohibitive. As a result, the concept was largely abandoned. Wellington’s Downstage opened in 1964, Auckland’s Mercury in 1968, and in Christchurch the Court was established in 1971. It was the realization of Ngaio’s dream of professional opportunities and standards of production in New Zealand theatre. She had hoped it could be achieved through a national theatre company, but accepted now that this was more likely to be achieved through independent urban-based professional companies.

Directing was Hooper’s ‘
true metier
& Jonathan has had shining notices for his performance in
The Millionairess
…& Jimmy Laurenson goes from strength to strength. So all this old bird’s chicks prosper,’ she told Bruce Mason.

Less pleasing was the news that a rogue American publisher had pirated 23 of her novels and was selling them illegally. She was informed of the fraud by the American Mystery Writers Association. The distressing episode became a lengthy saga of lawyers and to and fro correspondence with little resolution. ‘
It may turn out to be
an operation of the stable-door kind,’ she wrote to Doris McIntosh, and she was right.

A highlight of 1978 was a last trip in July to stay with the Dacres-Mannings family in Sydney. ‘
My visit to Johnny
and Bet in Sydney was great fun. They are such darlings & the children are Heaven.’ The purpose of the visit was to see her godson Nicholas confirmed. The trip back to New Zealand realized all of Ngaio’s fears of flying. In anticipation of turbulence, before they took off the pilot warned passengers not to be concerned when the wings ‘wobbled’. This was the entrée to a flight from hell. Ngaio had gastro-enteritis, which added to her difficulties. ‘
Drawers opened
of their own accord, china crashed, everything was
bouncy-bouncy’, and when she arrived she was almost blown off the tarmac.

Not long after her return to Christchurch, Ngaio began a new novel. Her mobility was limited. ‘
One begins to wonder
which bit of one is
going
to be left in something like working order.’ Writing, however, was something she could do successfully. In October she wrote to Doris McIntosh: ‘
I’m glued to my work
& see & think of little else than how to pin a plot to a group of characters…It’s a worrying & disagreeable phase.’ She hoped the novel would emerge from its misty beginnings.
Photo-Finish
proved almost as difficult to write as its predecessor. For only the fourth time in a career spanning almost 50 years, Ngaio set the story in New Zealand. She worried about the ‘
danger of letting it
degenerate into a sort of travelogue with a crime theme pinned on to it’, but she continued to write in spite of her ‘usual doubts’. She planned to dedicate the book to Fred and Eve Page.

Ngaio celebrated her Christmas tree: ‘
Presents, visits
innumerable from all my old “children” of the Shakespeare days. I find it impossible to believe that the earliest ones are approaching the 50 mark.’

Collins requested changes to the manuscript of
Photo-Finish
—they wanted four keys instead of three—but these alterations were superficial. A reader’s report extolled the book’s virtues, although exchanges between Alleyn and Fox were described as ‘distasteful’ and Alleyn’s relationship with Troy ‘dowsed with customary treacle’:

The which said
, the story is an astonishing achievement by a woman of 80 [actually, 84], and it shows her to have kept her vitality and control much longer than Agatha did. It is witty, the setting is impressive, the plot is tidily organised and the solution is dramatic. What more?…This is a rich and engrossing story by a professional who has not lost her cunning.

Collins wanted to publish the book as part of their Crime Club’s jubilee celebrations. Ngaio’s
Scales of Justice
had featured in their silver anniversary celebrations and this was a remarkable demonstration of publishing continuity. There was to be an honorary dinner on 23 April 1980, which was Ngaio’s and Shakespeare’s birthday and St George’s Day. Fifteen senior police officers were invited, along with Crime Club authors and a heavy contingent of media. ‘
We had an enormous
white iced cake with a huge Crime Club Gunman on it, and the words: “Collins Crime Club, 1930-1980” embossed on it in gold lettering,’
Elizabeth Walter wrote to Ngaio. Ian Chapman of Collins made a speech, Julian Symons replied, and Walter cut the cake with a huge sword. She offered to send Ngaio a slice. ‘
Fossilized or not
,’ Ngaio replied, ‘I shall give my piece of cake a hearty, nostalgic munch.’

Photo-Finish
was a return to better form for Ngaio. The structure was tighter, and the setting fresher for its change of air. The New Zealand outdoors provides an epic backdrop to the murder of world-famous opera singer Isabella Sommita. Television presenter
Max Cryer
, who visited Ngaio at Marton Cottage at this time, said she told him Isabella Sommita was based on Maria Callas, and the soprano certainly comes across as a similarly larger-than-life character. ‘The lady has the temperament of a wild cat and the appetite of a hyena,’ says her singing master, Signor Lattienzo.

The conventions are Golden Age—a house party at a luxurious island lodge in the middle of a fictitious South Island lake—but some of the issues are contemporary, especially that of a stalking member of the paparazzi who makes Isabella Sommita’s life unbearable. She is followed relentlessly—Milan, Paris, London, New York, Sydney—and ugly gratuitous snaps were taken and published with ridiculous captions. ‘The general effect [of one of the published photographs] was that of a gargoyle at the dentist’s: an elderly and infuriated gargoyle. The photograph was signed Strix.’ Alleyn is dispatched from England to relieve Isabella Sommita of her pursuer and, by an astonishing coincidence, Troy is commissioned to paint a portrait of the diva’s benefactor, Montague V. Reece. This will be another busman’s holiday.

Photo-Finish
was released in September 1980, to warm reviews and pleasing sales. ‘
My memory is deteriorating
but fortunately not, so far, in the matter of writing books & I am a happy old girl by & large,’ she told John Balfour. Writing gave Ngaio purpose and kept her vital.

One of the literary challenges of 1980-81 was a revision of
Black Beech.
David Elworthy in Auckland broached the subject with Ngaio and Elizabeth Walter. Ngaio’s response was that ‘
her life since the early fifties
had been singularly dull’, but she would make an attempt, and Walter replied: ‘it would give me great personal pleasure to do the book, but it does need to be something more than the original modest memoir’. Ngaio tackled the gaps by adding material about her crime fiction writing and aging. She completed the 30,000-word extension in January 1981. ‘
It’s been tricky work
,’ she admitted to Maureen Balfour, ‘sandwiching new bits into old ones & the end result is anyone’s guess.’
The additions were more revealing about Ngaio as a writer and an older woman, but did not illuminate the private psychological life that Elizabeth Walter had hoped to read more about. Ngaio had still not let her hair down.

Ironically, at the same time as she was making additions to
Black Beech,
she was systematically destroying papers. Each day her housekeeper, Joy Carter (now Wilkinson), was given piles of documents—letters, notes, handwritten manuscripts and even photographs—to take down to the incinerator to burn: ‘
I took arm loads
each afternoon.’ It was a practical endeavour that coincided with extensive renovations to the house, but it was also an expunging of the private Ngaio. She had destroyed correspondence throughout her life: this was a final purge.