Edith Ngaio Marsh is one of the Crime Queens of the Golden Age, the others acknowledged to be Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers.
Born in New Zealand in 1895, Ngaio Marsh was a precocious child with a love of drama and history nurtured by her mother. She was educated at St Margaret’s College, Christchurch, where she excelled in the arts and academic subjects and began to develop her lifelong interest in the theatre. Her first play, Noel, was performed at the College in 1912 and others—The Moon Princess and Mrs ’Obson—were staged at a nearby school in 1913. After leaving St Margaret’s, she studied painting at the Canterbury College School of Art and in 1919 joined the Allan Wilkie Shakespeare Company on a tour of New Zealand, an experience she would draw on some time later for a crime novel. In 1920 she joined the Rosemary Rees English Comedy Company and, as well as acting, she continued to write plays, including So Much for Nothing (1921) and the curiously titled harlequinade Little House Bound (1924).
In 1928, Marsh moved to London where she and a friend, Helen Rhodes, ran an interior decorating business in Knightsbridge. She stayed for four years and while there decided to write a crime novel. For this, her main inspiration was naturally enough something she had read—‘a Christie or a Sayers, I think’—but she was also influenced by the Murder Game, then a dinner party staple. The result, A Man Lay Dead (1934), introduced ‘’andsome Alleyn’ of Scotland Yard who would go on to appear in a total of thirty-two novels and some plays that Marsh adapted or co-adapted from them. Alleyn—pronounced ‘Allen’, like the English school—also investigates in five short stories, one of which remains unpublished. Another, ‘which would explain why he left the Diplomatic Service for the Police Force’, was never written.
Whereas many mystery writers plan stories around plots or situations, Ngaio Marsh always began with characters. Like her great contemporary Agatha Christie, she was very much influenced by the theatre, but whereas Christie drew on her knowledge of theatrical tropes to deceive her readers, Marsh simply wrote like a playwright, structuring and pacing her novels like a play: the scene is set, the cast of characters introduced, and the plot is unravelled as carefully and methodically as it was constructed. Just as the audience at a play sees the plot unfold through the eyes of a protagonist, in a Ngaio Marsh novel the reader is guided for the most part by the investigator, seeing what he sees and hearing what he hears. Thus Marsh’s work adheres very strongly to the fair-play principle and the reader has every chance of beating the detective to the explanation of the crime.
While she would write crime fiction for the rest of her life, Ngaio Marsh’s first love was always the theatre. Between 1943 and 1969, she produced more than half of Shakespeare’s plays and created the British Commonwealth Theatre Company, which toured in the early 1950s. Her understanding of Shakespeare’s works and technique led to appearances at numerous international conferences and, in 1966, she was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Through the 1970s, while Marsh’s energy and appetite for new challenges remained undimmed, her health was beginning to decline. Her final novel was the supremely theatrical Light Thickens (1982), which centres on a production of Macbeth, a play that Marsh had herself directed in 1946 and 1962.
Ngaio Marsh died on 18 February 1982 at her home in the Cashmere Hills near Christchurch. Despite the passage of nearly forty years, her novels remain extremely popular, and in 2018 her many admirers were treated to a new Alleyn mystery: Money in the Morgue was written by Stella Duffy working from little more than three initial chapters by Marsh and, while many of the most famous characters of the Golden Age have been reincarnated in new continuation novels, Money in the Morgue is among the very best.
‘A Knotty Problem’ was first broadcast under the title ‘Slipknot’ on 19 September 1967 as part of the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation’s ‘Television Workshop’ season. Sadly there are no extant recordings and this is its first publication.