Ngaio could have chosen a more conventionally upper-class place for her detective to recuperate. He could have basked in the warmth of the Riviera, or enjoyed the buzz of the metropolis—Paris, Rome, Berlin—anywhere but the crisp stillness of a small mid-North Island town moving into winter. But although a murder mystery was traditionally pure entertainment, and not intended to be taken seriously, a clever writer like Ngaio had opinions, especially about New Zealand and its problematic relationship with Britain. Vintage Murder gave these their first proper airing. There is no Nigel Bathgate, so the central consciousness becomes Alleyn himself, and the story unfolds from his perspective. Whatever health breakdown he has had has transformed him: any remnant of silly-assed sleuth has gone. He is more considered, reflective and mature, but his seriousness is meted by a clever strain of humour that runs through the book. Alleyn is aware of his outsider status in relation to both Pakeha cultural cringe and Maori cultural difference.
His contribution to the case is welcomed by local police, because he knows the company of English actors involved. ‘It looks as if it’s an English case more than a New Zillund one, now, doesn’t it?’ says Sergeant Wade, sheepishly parodying his own accent. Alleyn is sensitive to the power dynamic. ‘“I suppose,” thought Alleyn, “I must give him an inferiority complex. He feels I’m criticising him all the time. If I don’t remember to be frightfully hearty and friendly, he’ll think I’m all English and superior.”‘ Pakeha New Zealanders feel second-rate around Alleyn. In spite of his politeness, he makes them aware of their difference. They are changing and losing touch with their English and European roots as the Maori have with their indigenous heritage. Pakeha ambivalence comes from the fact that New Zealand will never be their place of origin. Ngaio lampoons the Pakeha dilemma. Young Detective Inspector Packer hero-worships Alleyn in language she loathed. ‘“He looks like one of those swells in the English flicks,” [Packer] afterwards confided to his girl, “and he talks with a corker sort of voice. Not queeny, but just corker. I reckon he’s all right. Gosh, I reckon he’s a humdinger.”‘ Parker’s cringe is internalized, like Ngaio’s, and the same applied to many Pakeha New Zealanders of this era.
The position of Maori is less complicated because they are the indigenous people, and in some respects Ngaio’s treatment is more sympathetic. Alleyn is the first bicultural Golden Age detective. He attempts to understand the case according to Pakeha and Maori laws. It is Alfred Meyer who insults the sacredness of the he tiki on his wife’s birthday, and it is his head that is pulverized almost as soon as he does. Alleyn asks his cultured Maori confidant, Dr Rangi Te Pokiha, ‘Tell me,…if it’s not an impertinent question, do you yourself feel anything of what your ancestors would have felt in regard to this coincidence?’ He is trying to understand tapu and the meting out of consequences for its infringement.
The difficulties of colonization for Maori are also movingly explained by the Oxford-trained Te Pokiha, who has interrupted a promising academic career to train as a doctor. ‘I began to see the terrible inroads made by civilization in the health of my own people. Tuberculosis, syphilis, typhoid.’ But his comments on appropriation are even more revealing. ‘The pakeha give their children Maori Christian names because they sound pretty. They call their ships and their houses by Maori names…We have become a side-show in the tourist bureau—our dances—our art—everything.’ He is talking about Ngaio’s parents, who named her after the white-blossomed native ngaio tree, and about the frenetic Pakeha search for ‘signs’ of New Zealand identity plundered from Maori culture.
Ngaio may have used popular fiction to explore social issues, but she never lost sight of the need to entertain. Vintage Murder encourages people to think about bicultural issues, but it does not unravel stereotypes. There is something still of the noble savage in Te Pokiha, and an inappropriateness in Alleyn’s pompous thinking about him. In the dénouement, Te Pokiha almost comes to blows with the murderer. ‘His lips coarsened into a sort of snarl. He showed his teeth like a dog. “By Jove,” thought Alleyn, “the odd twenty percent of pure savage.”‘ With that racist thought, Alleyn confirms his outsider status.
Three months later, his New Zealand holiday nearly over, Alleyn is sitting on tussock looking across Lake Pukaki to Mount Aorangi, the cloud-piercer, and thinking of home. He has three letters in his pocket: one from Carolyn Dacres announcing her pregnancy—the greenstone he tiki ‘has fulfilled its purpose’; another from his assistant commissioner; and a final one from Inspector Fox, saying how glad they will be to see him back at the Yard again. Many of Alleyn’s New Zealand insights occur in the form of correspondence with Fox. His letters home to England are an important narrative thread, and his thoughts in them private and spontaneous. Ngaio’s letters to Nelly Rhodes were the same. After nearly five years in New Zealand, England seemed like a distant dream. Like Alleyn, she was ready to go back.
CHAPTER THREE Companions in Crime
‘It started off rather grandly with a printed invitation to Grosvenor House from the Detection Club,’ Ngaio explained later. They ate in a private dining room, with the Chief Constable of Surrey as guest speaker, but the meal was prelude to a more significant event: the 1937 induction of E.C. Bentley as president of the Detection Club. The cream of crime was there: Dorothy Sayers, John Rhode, Anthony Gilbert and Freeman Wills Croft, to name a few. After the speeches, they withdrew to a private drawing room where the real business began. Dorothy Sayers was mistress of ceremonies. Her imposing figure, ‘robust, round and rubicund’, towered over her colleagues. She struck Ngaio as something of ‘a cross between a guardsman & a female don with a jolly face (garnished with pince-nez), short grey curls, & a gruff voice’. Agatha Christie was not in attendance, but she would meet with Ngaio later that evening at the Detection Club rooms in Soho. In the meantime, Ngaio and her agent were seated in two chairs against an imposing rostrum. ‘I should explain before I go any further that my agent is a man with an ironic turn of mind…& a most singularly loud laugh.’ They were left alone in the room and suddenly the lights went out and there was blackness.
A door at the far end opened (as all doors in detective novels open) slowly. In came Miss Dorothy Sayers in her academic robes lit by a single taper. She mounted the rostrum. Judge my alarm when I saw that among the folds of her gown she secreted a large automatic revolver. She lit candles on her desk &…uttered some intimidating order. In came the others in a solemn procession bearing lighted tapers & lethal instruments. There was the warden of the blunt instrument—a frightful bludgeon, the warden of the sharp instrument—I think it was a dagger—the warden of the deadly phial, & last of all John Rhode with a grinning skull on a cushion. And there, in the middle of them, looking apprehensive, as well he might, was poor Mr Bentley.
With huge solemnity, Sayers administered the Detection Club oath to Bentley who promised:
under pain of every horror that every concoctor of crime fiction has ever invented to obey the laws of detective fiction. Never to conceal a clue. Never to leave a knotty point unravelled. To place before the reader every scrap of information that is relevant to the solution…He took the oath & then close to my ear & without the slightest hint of warning, in a private drawing room at Grosvenor House at about 11 p.m. on a summer evening Miss Dorothy Sayers loosed off her six-shooter. The others uttering primitive cries, waved their instruments, blunt sharp & venomous, & John Rhode, by means of some hidden device, caused his skull to be lit up from within. And to my undying shame my agent laughed like a hyena. The ceremony was practically over, which is perhaps the reason my agent escaped with his life.
Ngaio’s writing had earned her a place in the inner sanctum of British detective fiction. Since her début with A Man Lay Dead in 1934, she had written four titles, and when she arrived in London in the spring of 1937 it was with the manuscript for her sixth, Artists in Crime. She was sufficiently esteemed to be invited to a Detection Club dinner. If she had lived in London she would have been a member, but the club requirement that members attend five or six meetings