Death in Ecstasy makes teasing reference to Ngaio’s colleagues in crime. She is playing with the reader and with other writers of detective fiction. It is halfway through the story and Alleyn and Nigel Bathgate are ‘taking stock’:
‘Look here,’ said Nigel suddenly, ‘let’s pretend it’s a detective novel. Where would we be by this time? About halfway through, I should think. Well who’s your pick [for the murderer]?’
‘I am invariably gulled by detective novels [Alleyn replied]…You see in real detection herrings are so often out of season.’
‘Well, never mind, who’s your pick?’
‘It depends on the author. If it’s Agatha Christie, Miss Wade’s occulted guilt drips from every page. Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter would plump for Pringle, I fancy. [Freeman Wills Croft’s] Inspector French would go for Ogden.’
This is a delicious irony, a playful piece of unconscious self-consciousness that underscores the real nature of Alleyn’s and Bathgate’s existence compared with their fictional colleagues. Ngaio’s humour, her increased confidence as a writer, and her respect for practitioners like Christie, Sayers, and Freeman Wills Croft inspired this very public private joke. She also paid her respects to Arthur Conan Doyle. ‘I receive facts…as a spider does flies,’ announces Alleyn in Holmesian style, and Bathgate makes this slightly nauseating comment: ‘I am your Watson, and your worm. You may both sit and trample on me. I shall continue to offer you the fruits of my inexperience.’
Ngaio would return to the theme of human gullibility in the face of religious sham, but never again with quite the same echo of reality. ‘Damn, sickly, pseudo, bogus, mumbojumbo,’ says Alleyn with great violence about Father Garnette, and those were Ngaio’s thoughts. As an adult she was sceptical about all religion. She grieved for the loss of her adolescent fervour, wanted to believe in Christianity, but the leap of faith became a chasm.
Ngaio was the only agnostic Queen of Crime. Agatha Christie slept all her life with a crucifix by her bed; Dorothy Sayers was a theologian and a devout, if not always practising, Christian; and Margery Allingham became an avid follower of Christianity in her later years. Ronald Knox was the Roman Catholic chaplain at Oxford University when he formulated the precepts of Golden Age detective fiction in his ‘Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes’, published in 1928. His precepts were steeped in Christian ideology. For the Queens of Crime, writing about murder was not a betrayal of Faith but an affirmation, the Christian theme of sin and expiation played over and over again. The murder victim was the sacrificial lamb, given up so that the agent of sin, the murderer, could be found out and exorcized. The detective was the high priest, the detective story a modern apocrypha. Ngaio may have lost faith in the Christian message, but she never tired of retelling its story.
In the evenings, when she began a new book, Ngaio wandered from room to room. In perpetual motion she formed the ideas, and it was often daybreak before they flowed freely. She slept, then waited again until nightfall to begin bringing her characters alive. Her nocturnal habits meant she rose late, but the rest of the day was free for the theatre and to paint. Exit Sir Derek reconnected her with repertory, which was lively in the city. Stepping onto the stage took her back to her beginnings. As a child she had written a play in rhyming couplets for a cast of six, called Cinderella, and at St Margaret’s Bundles and The Moon Princess. It was the arrival of the Allan Wilkie Shakespeare Company in 1915 that rekindled her interest in writing for the theatre. She was transfixed, as if she was watching the progress of a miraculous comet across the sky. ‘The opening night of Hamlet was the most enchanted I was ever to spend in the theatre.’ English actor-manager Wilkie, his striking actress wife Frediswyde Hunter-Watts, and their travelling company played to audiences in the Far East, North America and Australasia. They were the remnant of a bygone era, but to a centre starved of professional theatre they seemed rare and illustrious. People queued for tickets, Ngaio and her student friends cut evening art classes, and for two weeks Shakespeare took Christchurch by storm.
Ghosts, gravediggers and Danes walked the ramparts of Ngaio’s quiet nights. She went to Hamlet a number of times. The season ended too quickly, and as abruptly as it had arrived the company was gone. The experience had been ephemeral, like a shadow she wanted to pin down, so between the company’s first and third visits to Christchurch she wrote a romantic regency drama called The Medallion. She hoped Allan Wilkie would cast a professional eye over it. Her mother encouraged her. Towards the end of 1919, they braved the ordeal of handing the script in at the theatre with a note, then seeing Allan Wilkie in person at the Clarendon Hotel. As always, Ngaio was tentative about her writing. The play was mannered and rhetorical, but her raw enthusiasm captured Wilkie’s attention.
After art classes had finished one afternoon, Ngaio returned to her shared studio with her paint-box slung over her shoulder. She climbed the stairs, walked in, and there they were—Allan Wilkie and his wife. ‘“I obtained the address,” Mr. Wilkie said in his resonant actor’s voice, “from your father. I have a suggestion to make…How…would you like to be an actress?”‘ He thought that if she was going to write for the theatre she needed experience on the stage. She was speechless, stunned. It was as if Wilkie had opened a door through which she glimpsed her future. She had two hours to make up her mind. The Wilkies were leaving town almost immediately, but would employ her when they returned, if her parents agreed.
Ngaio’s ‘yes’ was immediate, and her father’s followed; Rose Marsh was harder to please. But Peter Tokareff’s suicide was still fresh in her mind, and now there was a new threat. Her daughter had another besotted suitor, this time a middle-aged Englishman. Once again, Ngaio was flattered, but out of her depth.
‘Your father,’ [Rose] said, ‘will speak to him.’
And so he did and to some effect. ‘I felt damn’ sorry for the fellow…He made such a thing of it…He’ll get over it, no doubt.’
But the Englishman began stalking Ngaio. ‘One night, when I was alone in the studio, he came up the stairs and stood…in utter silence on the landing while I sat petrified and sick, on the other side of the door.’
Fear forced Rose to agree to Ngaio’s touring with the Wilkies, plus the fact that she was greatly impressed with Allan Wilkie, who was a consummate charmer. Henry was amused: ‘So you’re off…with the raggle-taggle-gypsies, O.’ Ngaio was ecstatic. Rose felt she had been painted into a corner. While she waited for the company to return to Christchurch, Ngaio took a relieving position as lady editor at the Sun newspaper. She wrote about clothes, society hostesses and ‘concocted paragraphs to fill in the gaps’. Her anticipation mounted.
Ngaio was 25 years old and had never been out of the South Island. She would be living away from her parents and enjoying the pleasures of travel and adult life for the first time. ‘On a warm autumn morning I reported at the Theatre Royal, walked under the ringing iron stairs I had so often climbed and went in at the Stage Door. The world of glue-size, canvas, dust and shadows engulfed me.’ They played a season in Christchurch. The parts for Ngaio were limited. She had a deep contralto voice, which seemed odd in a woman, and was taller than the average leading man. As Wilkie remarked, ‘Only I…am at liberty to take six foot strides on this stage.’ To ensure she took demure steps, Ngaio hobbled her legs together above the knees with a stocking. The kindly Wilkie found her work in spite of this. She played a dubious ‘Franco-Teutonic’ maid in a spy thriller called The Luck of the Navy, where the main character was tied to a chair (like Nigel in A Man Lay Dead); an ex-WAAF, now housemaid, in A Temporary Gentleman; a vicious craggy crone in the farce The Rotters; and, in Hindle Wakes, yet another maid.
Rehearsals were arduous and Wilkie was a hard taskmaster, but Ngaio’s energy and enthusiasm seemed endless. ‘I learnt how actors work in consort,’ she wrote, ‘like musicians, how they shape the dialogue in its phrases, build