Taking A Closer Look At Ngaio Marsh

Dear listeners,

Today's date — 23rd April — is a special one for those of us with literary interests. Shakespeare was supposedly born on this date in 1564 and then died on it in 1616, so it is often marked with theatre-related festivals and performances. Which is very appropriate, given that in 1895 it also became the birthday of Ngaio Marsh, the celebrated author of mysteries and a famed director of plays, including those by Shakespeare. And so, today's newsletter is a look into the Shedunnit archive to bring you some of the best Ngaio Marsh moments from the past seven years.

In the episode "The Secret Life of Ngaio Marsh" from 2019, I interviewed historian Joanne Drayton, author of Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime. I was delighted to find out that biographer and subject had actually had a real life encounter when Joanne was a child:

"My family knew her and I met her myself as a young person. When I was eight I met Ngaio Marsh. My cousin actually was one of her proteges, her acting proteges. So I met her through the theatre and she was a very imposing, wow, absolutely sort of daunting to an eight year old character: very tall, very chic and stunning, really a stunning woman. With a voice that was so low and so deep and resonant that it sort of really blew you blew you away really. It was amazing."

I think you get a sense of how imposing a figure Ngaio Marsh cut from this photograph of her with her father that Joanne included in her book:

I devoted another whole episode to Ngaio Marsh in 2021, as part of the "Queens of Crime at War" series about what major golden age writers were doing during WW2. My guest for the episode "Ngaio Marsh Goes Home", Gail Pittaway, also had a personal encounter with Marsh to recall:

"She was very posh. Christchurch of all our cities prides itself on its Englishness. It's got private schools that are very much fashioned upon the English public school model and beautiful stone buildings, which of course have suffered terribly after the earthquakes. But she came from that very English-identified New Zealand family life. So she thought like an English person. She was from that older generation for whom England was still home."

This dual identity of Ngaio Marsh's is something that has come up over and over again when I have explored her work. She was born in New Zealand and passed many decades of her life there, but her parents were of English origin and she also travelled frequently to their home country. Of her 33 detective novels, only four are set in New Zealand; most of the others present a kind of heightened "Englishness" that is very familiar to readers of interwar whodunnits.

In her 1965 autobiography, Black Beech and Honeydew, Marsh addressed this topic herself, looking back at the age of 70:

"We are often told by English people how very English New Zealand is, their intention being complimentary.... I think we are more like the English of our pioneers' time then those of our own... If you put a selection of people from the British Isles into antipodean cold-storage for a century and a half then opened the door: we are what would emerge."

In that initial episode I made about her, "The Secret Life of Ngaio Marsh", I referred to Marsh as a chameleon, who was able to move between different places and social norms and fit in everywhere. As someone who was born and brought up in England but doesn't have English parents myself, I am quite familiar with this mode of being! I thought Joanne Drayton addressed it well in relation to Marsh's fiction in that episode:

"She fitted in there with Christie, Sayers, Allingham, Tey very well but she also had she could actually turn the genre into a New Zealand story as well in that period with all the same kind of cosy intensity, almost village like intensity, but it had that real New Zealand flavour. And if you're a New Zealander you recognise it profoundly in Died in the Wool and Colour Scheme and some of those amazing stories that speak to New Zealanders in a very personal more intimate way."

Aside from these two biographical episodes, Marsh's novels have featured in quite a number of Shedunnit episodes you might be interested to revisit. In "The Murder Mystery Hotline" I got to recommend some of her many theatre mysteries, including Enter a Murderer, Opening Night, Vintage Murder, Final Curtain and Death at the Dolphin. For my love letter to the pipe organ in detective fiction, "Instrument of Death", I referred to one of my favourites of hers, Overture to Death, in which a different musical instrument is put to a clever yet murderous purpose. And I touched on Death and the Dancing Footman in my episode "The Butler Did It", which is all about butlers and servants in detective fiction.

Ngaio Marsh has been very popular in the Shedunnit Book Club, with five of her novels chosen so far as monthly reads. If you are a member yourself, you can enjoy bonus episodes on each of Death and the Dancing Footman, The Nursing Home Murder, Death at the Bar, Vintage Murder and Tied Up In Tinsel. (If you aren't already a member of the Shedunnit Book Club, you can join here.)

And as my final recommendation, I must suggest that you pick up Joanne Drayton's Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime. First published in 2009, it's the most recent and up to date biography, and gives an excellent overview of Marsh's work in the theatre and her art beyond detective fiction.

In honour of what would have been her 130th birthday, I hope you find something there either by or about Ngaio Marsh to enjoy. I'll be back next Wednesday with another new episode of the podcast for you — it's one about a crime writer that I suspect will not be quite so familiar!

Until next time,

Caroline

You can listen to every episode of Shedunnit at shedunnitshow.com or on all major podcast apps. Selected episodes are available on BBC Sounds. There are also transcripts of all episodes on the website. The podcast is now newsletter-only — we're not updating social media — so if you'd like to spread the word about the show consider forwarding this email to a mystery-loving friend with the addition of a personal recommendation. Links to Blackwell’s are affiliate links, meaning that the podcast receives a small commission when you purchase a book there (the price remains the same for you).