Dame Ngaio Marsh OBITUARY .!.- Dame Ngaio Marsh, DBE, FRSA, who died in Christ- church, New Zealand, yester- day at the age of 82 was one of those writers who, during the 1930s raised the detective novel to a high level of literary art. In New Zealand, however, she was probably even better known- for her services to the theatre. Her father worked for the Bank of New Zealand and her maternal grandfather had been one of the first English settlers in New Zealand. She was born on April 23 1899' and given the Maori name, Ngaio, which is a flowering tree and also means "light on the water". After being educated at St Margaret's CoUege and Canterbury Uni- versity College School of Art, Christchurch, she spent sev- eral years touring, sporadi- cally as a repertory actress, before coming to England in 1928 to stay with the colour- ful aristocratic family about whom she afterwards wrote as the "Lampreys". In part- nership with one of them, she opened and ran a precarious- ly viable gift shop in Knightsbridge. As an amusement on wet evenings, she scribbled out her first novel, A Man Lay Dead (1934). This was an amateurish work, but it introduced the hero of all her stories, Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn (named after the Elizabethan actor who founded her father's school, Dulwich). During the next few years, in such books as Vintage Murder (1937), Art- ists in Crime (1938) and Death in a White Tie (1938) her style and sense 01 character matured. Surfeit of Lampreys (1941) was recog- nized as an. almost perfect classical detective story, combining an ingenious puz- zle with all the attributes of a good novel. For settings and background material she used her interest in art (Alleyn married Agatha Troy, a famous painter), her own New Zealand country sidc (notably in wartime stories Colour Scheme (1943) and Died in the Wool (1945)), and her knowledge of the theatre, which provided the frame- work for some of her most successful books, such as Final Curtain (1947), Opening Night (1951) and False Scent (1960). Her mother's illness had taken her back to New Zealand where she kept house for her father and wrote detective stories. When war broke out she joined the Red Cross Transport Unit and became a Head Section- Leader. At the same time she .directed plays for a number of Repertbry Societies: In 1944 she began working with Mr D. D. O'Connor to establishi a permanent non- profit-making theatre guild which would, as she put it "get a strong drama thread weaving between Great Bri- tain and the Dominions". She was appointed honor- ary lecturer in Drama at Canterbury University Col- lege. and in 1948 was ap- iointed ORE for "services to New Zealand drama and literature". She was made DBE in 1966, this honour, too, being as much a recog- nitions or her work in the theatre, as for her writing. When she came to England to recruit young actors for a tour of New Zealand and Australia, Anthony Quayle introduced her to the Royal Empire Society as "the mother, sometimes the step- mother, always the god-moth- er" of whatever drama there was irrNew Zealand. Although.she spent at least four months of the year producing plays, writing books remained her chief business, and she took it seriously. "My standards, of style and plot, have gone up," she said in 1960. "I start with characters. I think my books are always terribly easy to guess, and of course I could make it harder by falsifying the characters. That's the real danger of artificiality in detective sto- ries." This was a shrewd assessment of her own work. What her readers continued to enjoy was not the prob- lem, which often seemed old- fashioned by the changing standards of post-war crime fiction, but the, affectionate wit generously lavished even on her minor characters. If her most recent books be- trayed a certain slackening of energy, they did include one, Black As He's Painted (1974) which in its Kensington setting and. its gaiety of style went back to, and was worthy of, her very best period. She came regularly to London, which always held a quality of romance for her, but her home was still the wooden house, with its beautiful garden overlooking Christchurch, which her father had built. Memories of New Zealand when she was a child, *her loved and loving parents, of how she was drawn into the theatre, and of her first impressions of London, are most engagingly recalled in her autobiography, Black Beech and Honeydew (1966). DAME NGAIO MARSH Crime novelist and influence on : New Zealand drama - :.
