Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime Read Free

abhors the carrying of guns and capital punishment. Fox says to him in Death in Ecstasy: ‘I know how you feel about homicide cases. I’d put it down to your imagination…I’m not at all fanciful, myself, but it does seem queer to me sometimes, how calm-like we get to work…and all the time there’s a trap and a rope and a broken neck at the end if we do our job properly.’
    Alleyn is haunted by the consequences of a good result, but it is love, not death, that makes him really question his job. When they leave the ship at Southampton and find themselves tied up in the same murder case, with Troy as a suspect, Alleyn is full of qualms. He realizes she is appalled by the very aspects of his work that disturb him. Troy is running a small residential painting school at her home at Tatler’s End when, in full view of the class, the life model is dramatically impaled on a dagger, wedged through the back of the wooden throne. Only one of Troy’s pupils has pushed the model down onto the dagger,but everyone in the studio has a motive to kill her. The invasion of Troy’s privacy and that of her pupils, when Alleyn begins his investigation, makes Troy angry, and she challenges him:
‘Do you want to search our rooms for something? Is that it?’
    ‘Not for anything specific. I feel we should just—’ He stopped short. ‘I detest my job,’ he said; ‘for the first time I despise and detest it.’
    And if this is not disquieting enough for Alleyn, Troy is also worried about losing her independence and identity as a painter. He can see how she shies away whenever she imagines herself becoming subsumed by his job and their relationship. Through Troy, Ngaio communicates a modern woman’s reluctance to sacrifice her career and her individuality to marriage; through Alleyn, she traces a modern man’s waking comprehension of this. Theirs will be a marriage of equality, but getting to the altar will be fraught.
    Not many of Ngaio’s books are more biographically poignant than Artists in Crime. She knew the workings of the life room by heart. ‘ I enjoyed best the nights when we made time studies from the nude,’ she wrote in Black Beech.
The model…was Miss Carter, a dictatorial but good-tempered girl who had come to us from show business…She was a big fair creature. If a twist of the torso or pelvis was asked of her she would grumble professionally and then grin. The gas heaters roared and the great lamp above the throne held the motionless figure in a pool of light. When the door was opened the students hurried in to manoeuvre for places. In a semi-circle round the throne sat people on ‘donkeys’ and behind them easels jockeyed for vantage points. ‘Have you see [sic] it from over there?’ Mr Wallwork would mutter, with a jerk of his head and one would hurriedly shift into the gap he indicated. The room looked like a drawing from Trilby: timeless, oddly dramatic, sweltering-hot and alive with concentration.
    Richard Wallwork took life classes at Canterbury College in the best of a very academic and staid tradition. But his talented students, and his inspiration as a teacher, made up for many of the progressive ideas that were missing. One of his cleverest students was Olivia Spencer Bower, a young woman freshly back, in 1919, from art school in Britain. She began classes at the end of Ngaio’s timeat Canterbury College. One day she remembered that ‘the model hadn’t turned up & Ngaio was doing the job’.
Mr Wallwork was pushing her around on the Throne mid gales of laughter. It was the personality which intrigues. Then one day I met her outside a painting shop in Colombo Street. She had on an enormous camel hair coat with high collar & great wide shoulders. I came home in rather shocked surprise & said to my mother—do you know she’s beautiful.
    Ngaio sat for her artist friends formally and informally. She knew what it was like to be manhandled by someone setting a pose. She could imagine the consequences