Murder in a Clear, Cool Voice

Early in what would become a distinguished theatrical career, the New Zealand mystery writer Ngaio Marsh watched a group of fellow actors rehearse a scene. Again and again the players repeated “Good morning” to each other, listening intently, changing cadences, adjusting pauses until the director felt satisfied the rhythm was right. “When, in after years, I became a producer,” writes Marsh in her autobiography Black Beech and Honeydew (1965), “and when, at last, the plays I directed were Shakespeare’s, I remembered, most clearly of all the lessons I had been given, this commonplace exchange of ‘Good mornings’ and how the final word had fallen so sweetly and justly into its appointed resolution.” The story reveals as much about the education of a novelist as that of a theatrical director. Not only did Marsh learn much from the technical demands of the stage and set five of her thirty-two murder mysteries in the world of actors and theaters, but her graceful style and engaging dialogue bear the marks of close attention to living speech. Ngaio Marsh the young actor, eagerly absorbing the fine points of drama, was acquiring the tools of a confident writer, one who stretched the boundaries of the mystery genre.

In 1966 Marsh was named Dame Commander of the British Empire—but neither a future title, nor Shakespeare, nor steady commercial success could save her from a cranky Edmund Wilson, who described Marsh’s prose as “unappetizing sawdust” and called mystery reading in general “simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between smoking and crossword puzzles.” The crossword-puzzle comparison is apt, if the smoking one isn’t. Like passionate crossword solvers, who grumble at an iffy definition or when two unheard-of terms intersect, puzzle-mystery readers of the 1920s and ’30s—the genre’s Golden Age—demanded fair play and strict adherence to rules. The resulting rigid conventions landed Marsh in an awkward middle ground. Some readers yawned through her repetitive police procedures and formulaic handling of clues, while Agatha Christie fans, accustomed to indifferent prose and Colonel Mustard–like characters, distrusted her suave style, detailed portraits, and other lapses from accepted form. Perhaps it’s only now, seventy-five years removed from the peak of her career, that we can appreciate the unique balance between observing and breaking the rules that defines Marsh’s work.

In Death of a Peer (1940), published when Marsh had been writing fiction for about a decade, the crime-solving routine reveals the murderer’s identity but also throws unexpected light on the other characters, often in ways only partially related to the central catastrophe. Like every Marsh novel, Death of a Peer features Chief Detective-Inspector Roderick Alleyn, a genial aristocrat who “dresses” for a quiet dinner with his mother. Accompanying Alleyn is his unassuming, regular-guy assistant, Mr. Fox. For the first quarter of the novel, however, Marsh delivers a tender account of a twenty-year-old New Zealander, recently orphaned, who visits a wealthy London family she knew as a girl. Reunited with the Lampreys in their plush modern flat, Roberta Grey thrills again to their irresponsible gaiety and their knack of hurtling from one financial crisis to the next without compromising their need for “fun.” Although “visited by the odd idea that it was she who had grown so much older and that the young Lampreys had merely grown taller,” Roberta blissfully resumes her place in the loony household. The day after her arrival a visiting uncle is discovered with a meat skewer protruding from his eye.

Up to this point the Lampreys have been pretty unbearable, the sort of people whose inside jokes and running gags would nauseate any normal outsider, but the reader has had to reach this judgment from Roberta’s adopted-insider point of view. Further, “the little New Zealander,” as Alleyn not unkindly comes to call her, perceives the family from the compromised position of a colonial upbringing, modest means, and her own inexperienced, hopeful youth. She’s a little dazzled by their expensive habits and their self-indulgent quirks, but...