Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime Read Free Page A

of a dagger jammed through the back of the bench.
    The tempestuous courtship of Alleyn and Troy continues unresolved through Artists in Crime, paralleling the police investigation, and just when the momentum of both is about to founder there is another murder, more hideous and haunting than any before. In Golden Age detective fiction, the horror of decay was usually mitigated by the narrow timeframe, and by makeshift shrouds and the sterile formality of mortuary vans, autopsy tables and coroner’s inquests. But this body, that of free-living artist Garcia, waits days to be discovered, in a dusty garret-like studio in a semi-derelict warehouse in the East End of London. You can almost smell his putrefying corpse in the words she uses. Troy has warned Garcia about his lifestyle. ‘While you’re here you’ve got to behave yourself. You know what I mean?…I won’t have any bogus Bohemianism, or free love, or mere promiscuity at Tatler’s End. It shocks the servants, and it’s messy, All right?’ But Garcia cannot contain himself, and pays for his drug addiction and womanizing with his life.
    Troy takes an orthodox stand on an issue Ngaio knew plenty about. Art studio life in Christchurch was bohemian. A sense of sexual freedom and fluidity reigned, and this was the milieu she sought out before and after her trip to England. But this repressed provincial bohemianism had to be circumspect to survive. Through the bedrock of Christchurch ran seams of liberalism, sexual licence, homosexuality and just plain eccentricity, which were known about but not usually discussed. Troy does not judge Garcia’s behaviour; she merely tells him to keep it out of sight.
    Artists in Crime was Ngaio’s last title published with Geoffrey Bles. Her agent Edmund Cork negotiated a more favourable contract with Collins, who wasalso Agatha Christie’s publisher. She left the company that launched her career with reluctance, but the advantages were undeniable. For the next four titles, she would receive an advance of £250 and 15 per cent royalties. From 1940 her American publisher would be Boston-based Little, Brown. In the meantime, Collins was wonderfully convenient because she was there in England to confirm arrangements and sign papers. Over the years, Ngaio established a close friendship with publishing magnate William (Billy) Collins, who in many ways resembled her dapper, well-mannered, well-meaning detective. Things were good for Ngaio. She was in a more lucrative stable with the promise of financial security, and England was an exciting place to be.
    She began writing for New Zealand syndicated newspapers under the pen name ‘The Canterbury Pilgrim Again’. Her exhilaration was clear in descriptions of her arrival in spring, which had more significance than New Zealand’s. ‘Here the trees are so long asleep, the fields hard with frost or sodden with the cold winter rains.’ The English countryside was awakening, and she was thrilled to see ‘the pricking of young buds’, the soft blades of new grass like ‘fine hair on the firm margins of hills’, and yellow flowers in cottage gardens and cowslips in the hedgerows.
    Her excitement was also there in descriptions of events leading up to the coronation of King George VI in May 1937. ‘ On the road outside Camberley we passed troops on their way up to London,’ she told readers. ‘When at last the roads turned finally into streets and scarlet buses joined the thickening stream of traffic, we saw banners hung out from all the windows.’ London was alive with festive buzz and ‘Hyde Park…turned into an enormous camp, with horse lines, tank lines, and rows and rows and rows of army tents’. Hazardous scaffolding was erected to clean huge civic monuments. ‘All that strange bronze and marble population of London will be smartened for the Coronation,’ she wrote. ‘Only the rabbits and mice round Peter Pan’s pedestal in Kensington Gardens have no need of spring cleaning,