LITMIR.BIZ

       Foreword

      What was so special about Ngaio Marsh? For a start she was one of the select band of female writers – those so-called ‘Queens of Crime’ – who dominated the world of the classical detective story in its heyday during the first half of the century. Yet unlike her rivals, writing was never her first love; she trained as a painter and later devoted herself to the theatre. In addition she was a New Zealander who, although a devoted Anglophile, was able to write about English life from the standpoint of a spectator – and the onlooker, as the well-known saying goes, sees most of the game.

      This unusual background suffuses her work and sets her apart from her famous contemporaries. She writes better than Agatha Christie, and unlike Dorothy Sayers Ngaio Marsh never commits the sin of falling in love with her detective and lapsing into sentimentality. An elegant, disciplined writer, Marsh deserves to be read and reread not just for her plots but for her characterization, for her painter’s eye view and for her outsider’s insights into the heart of a vanished social world. But most important of all, her books provide such satisfying entertainment; amusing and civilized but with an underlying sensitivity and compassion, they bring grace to a genre not noted for emotional depth. Ngaio Marsh was not just a manufacturer of literary crossword puzzles. She was a supremely readable storyteller who time and again compelled the reader to race eagerly onwards to the final page.

      An only child, she was born in a suburb of Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1895. Her father was a bank clerk who had emigrated from England seven years earlier, and when she was still small, the family moved to a newly-built house in the Cashmere Hills outside the city. This was to be Marsh’s home for the rest of her life, for although she was striking in her appearance and popular with her contemporaries, a certain deep-seated shyness and the death in the First War of a young man who was special to her ensured that she never married.

      Her ability to write well was recognized at school, but her primary talent at that time lay elsewhere, and at the Canterbury College School of Art she won a number of prizes and scholarships. Meanwhile her interest in the theatre had been kindled, and in her twenties she somehow found the time to pursue all three of her talents: living at home with her parents she devoted herself to painting, but she was also earning money writing articles for one of the Christchurch newspapers, and when she was in her mid-twenties she had an unexpected invitation to join a touring company as an actress.

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