Much has been made of the influence of the stage on Marsh’s detective stories. Many of her novels are centered on a theatrical company, including Enter a Murderer (1935), Vintage Murder (1937), Night at the Vulcan (1951), Killer Dolphin (1966), and Light Thickens (1982); and some of her nontheatrical novels, such as Death at the Bar (1940), feature actors as major characters. More significantly, Marsh sets a scene much in the way of a playwright. In the interviews that play so large a part in Alleyn’s investigations, she clearly visualizes where each character is standing or sitting in relation to the props—the furniture and other objects in the room. Her painter’s eye is also involved, for she describes the setting vividly yet without making it more than the backdrop for the people. Some scholars go even further. LeRoy Panek, in Watteau’s Shepherds, The Detective Novel in Britain (1979), analyzes the structure of her novels according to the Aristotelian rules for Greek drama. If this is going too far, there is no denying that she creates her stories with a feeling for dramatic interest, for placing of the climax, and for directing her characters in a way that is more the style of a playwright than a novelist. Although there are exceptions, we learn about Marsh’s characters not by what they tell us of themselves— the soliloquy had gone out of fashion by the time that Marsh began to write—but by how they relate to one another. In short, Marsh treats the reader as though he or she were a part of an audience at a play.
Marsh’s stories are related to a specific kind of play, the comedy of manners. The best works in this form are written by people who are in one way or another outsiders. As a New Zealander, Ngaio Marsh did not think—as Christie sometimes did—that the English class structure was the best of all possible worlds. I think that Death in a White Tie (1938) is the best of her early books, not because of the crime and solution but because of its sensitive discussion of the social expectations that produced the “season” of debutante balls. In the novel, poor but presentable women are hired to sponsor girls, including one who has an unhappy time in entering what amounts to a marriage market. Marsh comments that “she was not so very plain but only rather disastrously uneventful.” Troy sums up the situation: “There’s something so blasted cruel and barbaric about this season game.” Another character, one who approves of the system, also gains an insight into what it really means:
It took [Lord Robert] some time to get round the ballroom and as he edged past dancing couples and over the feet of sitting chaperones he suddenly felt as if an intruder had thrust open all the windows of this neat little world and let in a flood of uncompromising light. In this cruel light he saw the people he liked best and they were changed and belittled… He was plunged into a violent depression that had a sort of nightmareish quality. How many of these women were what he still thought of as “virtuous?” And the debutantes? They had gone back to chaperones and were guided and guarded by women, many of whose private lives would look ugly in this flood of hard light that had been let in on Lord Robert’s world. The girls were sheltered by a convention for three months but at the same time they heard all sorts of things that would have horrified and bewildered his sister Mildred at their age. And he wondered if the Victorian and Edwardian eras had been no more than freakish incidents in the history of society and if their proprieties had been as artificial as the paint on a modern woman’s lips. This idea seemed abominable to Lord Robert and he felt old and lonely for the first time in his life.
Those who argue that the detective story had to give way to the crime novel sometimes say that the classical, fair-play form did not allow commentary on society or on people. The above passage shows that it is less the form than the talent of the writer that makes for insights.
This volume contains all of Ngaio Marsh’s known uncollected fiction as well as a few related pieces. Following Marsh’s essays on the creations of Roderick and Troy Alleyn, the book reprints the three short stories about Alleyn originally published in periodicals over the space of thirty-four years. “Death on the Air,” which first appeared in a British magazine in 1939, is a typical closed-circle detective story of the period with a clever murder device and a cleverly hidden murderer. “I Can Find My Way Out,” published in 1946, is Marsh’s only short story with a theatrical setting, and it contains her bow to one of the most famous detectival plot devices, murder in a locked room. “Chapter and Verse,” from 1973, has a plot that could easily have been expanded into a full-length novel, and like the previous story is redolent of the Golden Age of Detection. The remaining tales are urbane studies of crime. The short-short “The Hand in the Sand” (1953) is Marsh’s only venture into writing about true crime. “The Cupid Mirror” (1972) and “A Fool About Money” (1974) are completely different from each other except in one way—they conclude with a victory over a totally exasperating person. “Morepork” (1978), Marsh’s final and probably best short story, tells of an odd trial in the forests of New Zealand. The book concludes with Evil Liver, a previously unpublished telescript produced in 1975, in which the viewer (or reader) must act as detective.
In assembling this book, I have become indebted to many people: Robert C. S. Adey, Margaret Lewis, Barry Pike, and Collin Southern helped to locate material. I am also grateful to Tony Medawar, researcher extraordinaire, whose investigation into the production of Evil Liver was invaluable. Granada Television Limited kindly allowed us to print Marsh’s telescript. Phyllis Westberg of the Harold Ober Company, American agents for the Marsh estate, was unfailingly helpful. Publishers normally are expected to act only as publishers, but Hugh Abramson of International Polygonics took a personal interest in this work and the result is a far better book than the editor could have produced alone.
Douglas G. Greene
Norfolk, Virginia
April 1989
Essays
He was born with the rank of Detective-Inspector, C.I.D., 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 passersby going to and fro, at eye-level, outside my water-streaked windows. It fanned out from under the tires 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.