‘Alleyn!’ he cried in a terrible voice, ‘Alleyn!’
‘What’s the matter?’ shouted Alleyn.
‘He’s here—he’s hanged himself—he’s here.’
‘Who?’
‘Props—it’s Props.’
His horrified face looked down at them.
‘It’s Props!’ he repeated…
‘Come down,’ said Alleyn.
Gardener comes down, and within six rungs of the stage he turns and sees the men who are awaiting him. With an incoherent cry he stops short. His lips are drawn back, showing his gums. A streak of saliva trickles down his chin. He squints. ‘And how do you know it is Props?’ asks Alleyn. In that instant, the actor is unmasked to reveal the murderer, and his animal-like snarl is confirmation. Felix Gardener is the face of deviance exposed. In Ngaio’s closed world, he represents a temporary aberration in the fabric of normality. As in most Golden Age detective fiction, his psychology, his pathology, his reason for being what he is, is of less interest than the process of his identification and removal. The genre’s focus is the restoration of order, and in the anxious decades of inter-war uncertainty this was immensely appealing.
The theatre provided Ngaio with the perfect place to stage a murder. It was a hermetic, hierarchical world where schedules and patterns of behaviour could be scrutinized and checked, and it was filled with sinister potential. Behind the stage was a labyrinth of backdrops, props and passageways; in front, when the lights went down, was a sea of blackness. Then there were the actors, their emotions heightened by the tensions of putting on a show and playing their parts. Among spectators, too, there was the buzz of excited expectation, and a tempting echo of crime novel readers, who were a parallel audience. It was an ideal backdrop against which to tease out issues. Ngaio was still intrigued by Pirandello’s Six Characters, with its metaphysical exploration of illusion and reality: ‘If you long above everything to be a director, this is the play that nags and clamours to be done.’ She was not yet directing actors, but she could direct characters. What interested her was the melodramatic way actors play themselves in real life.
‘Darling,’ [Stephanie Vaughan] said, taking her time over lighting a cigarette and quite unconsciously adopting the best of her six by-the-mantelpiece poses. ‘Darling, I’m so terribly, terribly upset by all this. I feel I’m to blame. I am to blame.’
Surbonadier was silent. Miss Vaughan changed her pose. He knew quite well, through long experience, what her next pose would be, and equally well that it would charm him as though he were watching her for the first time. Her voice would drop. She would purr. She did purr.
Enter a Murderer had more dramatic pace and change of scene than A Man Lay Dead, and the dialogue was more compelling and implicit in moving action along. The characters were convincing and in sharper relief. The theatre was not just a venue for crime, it was the book’s defining energy, creating a cohesive, vivid piece of writing.
Ngaio would write sunk in an armchair, mostly at night, with a favourite fountain pen filled with green ink in an exercise book or on loose-leaf foolscap paper in a hard cover resting on her knee. Only when the house lights went down did the characters come onto the stage of her imagination. The scenes would run through her mind almost complete, as if she were watching them. After she had written 1,000 words or so, the curtains were drawn and she would go to bed. She was disciplined and methodical, writing fluently with relatively few changes. Those she did make were written in the margins, above the line, or on the back of the facing page. The next day, what she had written would be typed by the woman she paid to handle her correspondence. She needed help and enjoyed her secretary’s regular company.
Ngaio found the recovery from her mother’s death ‘agonising’. Her father became a constant companion. ‘[When] we built a hut in the Temple Basin above Arthur’s Pass, he carried weatherboarding with the best of us up steep flanks in a nor’-west gale.’ One of Henry’s great gifts to his daughter was his spring of youthful energy. He gave her the ability to be physically and mentally young, long after youth usually lasted. In the latter part of his life he drew on it himself, tramping vast distances with her into the mountains. He played tennis, gardened, and continued his secretarial work. He was, in Ngaio’s mind at least, a Peter Pan figure who immersed himself in a Neverland of late-night Lexicon games and mild-mannered drinking sessions with the boys. She felt almost parental towards him, but there was a cantankerous side that could suddenly rear up and remind her of their true relationship. At a point when she could have become independent, the tables were turned, and Ngaio the only child began caring for her only parent. It worked because of an arrested development in them both: he was not looking for another wife and she was not searching for a husband—or even a life substantially different from that of her childhood at Marton Cottage.
In many ways Ngaio was an orthodox person, yet her dress was startling for a woman in New Zealand in the mid1930s. A photograph taken by her friend Olivia Spencer Bower in 1936 shows her seated on the back of a chair surrounded by fellow artists. She is conspicuous in her mannish slacks, tie and beret. Yet she wore her ‘cette monsieur-dame‘ dress to shock. Why? Was it to delineate herself as a modern woman? Was it to identify herself as a lesbian? Certainly, she knew it would signal both to some, and so this ambiguity may have been deliberate. But an androgynous persona was also commanding and theatrical, and more accurately perhaps expressed the woman she was. A person of independent means defined not by femininity, marriage or motherhood, but by her talent and skill as a writer and director. ‘I think I’m one of those solitary creatures that aren’t the marrying kind,’ she would later write in her autobiography.
But this was only partly true, because there was a gregarious side to Ngaio that was satisfied by her women friends. She began picking up the threads of her old life. During the summer of 1933-34, she went on trips to the mountains with her Canterbury College School of Art friends. With her father’s help they built a hut at Temple Basin so they could live and paint together. She loved the beauty and solitude of the magnificent ranges. On hot days the mountains became a suffocating crucible of stillness and heat, yet she found it cleansing. Olivia Spencer Bower painted Ngaio at her easel sketching the foothills of the Southern Alps on a dazzling Canterbury day, squinting into the brilliant sun, absorbed in her work, at one with the environment. Concentration on her painting and comfort in the company of old friends eased Ngaio’s grief. Although Spencer Bower made a number of images of Ngaio working in the landscape, it was Phyllis Bethune (née Drummond Sharpe) who was her most constant companion, and other friends such as Evelyn Page (née Polson), and Rata Lovell-Smith (née Bird) travelled with her to paint in places like the Aclands’ station at Peel Forest in South Canterbury, and the Mackenzie Country.
In the years immediately after the First World War, Christchurch had become the country’s leading centre for the visual arts. Canterbury College School of Art was buoyant and had a reputation as one of the best art schools in the country, known for its painters, especially those who painted landscape en plein air. The city had an active exhibition culture. ‘The Canterbury Society of Arts [CSA] was considered the most lively of New Zealand art societies.’
Ngaio and her friends were the cream of the art school. Ngaio had been enrolled there full-time from 1915 to 1919. Also attending had been Page, Lovell-Smith and Haszard; Spencer Bower had begun part-time study in 1920. Collectively, they represented a phenomenal blossoming of post-war female talent. Not only did they share the ambition to become professional painters, but they knew it was an unconventional role. ‘Life at an Art School is considered by many to be Bohemian; this, to a great extent is true,’ wrote Rhona Haszard. ‘To people passing along Rolleston Avenue…we may certainly appear eccentric as we