He also abhors the carrying of guns and capital punishment. Fox says to him in Death in Ecstasy: ‘I know how you feel about homicide cases. I’d put it down to your imagination…I’m not at all fanciful, myself, but it does seem queer to me sometimes, how calm-like we get to work…and all the time there’s a trap and a rope and a broken neck at the end if we do our job properly.’
Alleyn is haunted by the consequences of a good result, but it is love, not death, that makes him really question his job. When they leave the ship at Southampton and find themselves tied up in the same murder case, with Troy as a suspect, Alleyn is full of qualms. He realizes she is appalled by the very aspects of his work that disturb him. Troy is running a small residential painting school at her home at Tatler’s End when, in full view of the class, the life model is dramatically impaled on a dagger, wedged through the back of the wooden throne. Only one of Troy’s pupils has pushed the model down onto the dagger, but everyone in the studio has a motive to kill her. The invasion of Troy’s privacy and that of her pupils, when Alleyn begins his investigation, makes Troy angry, and she challenges him:
‘Do you want to search our rooms for something? Is that it?’
‘Not for anything specific. I feel we should just—’ He stopped short. ‘I detest my job,’ he said; ‘for the first time I despise and detest it.’
And if this is not disquieting enough for Alleyn, Troy is also worried about losing her independence and identity as a painter. He can see how she shies away whenever she imagines herself becoming subsumed by his job and their relationship. Through Troy, Ngaio communicates a modern woman’s reluctance to sacrifice her career and her individuality to marriage; through Alleyn, she traces a modern man’s waking comprehension of this. Theirs will be a marriage of equality, but getting to the altar will be fraught.
Not many of Ngaio’s books are more biographically poignant than Artists in Crime. She knew the workings of the life room by heart. ‘I enjoyed best the nights when we made time studies from the nude,’ she wrote in Black Beech.
The model…was Miss Carter, a dictatorial but good-tempered girl who had come to us from show business…She was a big fair creature. If a twist of the torso or pelvis was asked of her she would grumble professionally and then grin. The gas heaters roared and the great lamp above the throne held the motionless figure in a pool of light. When the door was opened the students hurried in to manoeuvre for places. In a semi-circle round the throne sat people on ‘donkeys’ and behind them easels jockeyed for vantage points. ‘Have you see [sic] it from over there?’ Mr Wallwork would mutter, with a jerk of his head and one would hurriedly shift into the gap he indicated. The room looked like a drawing from Trilby: timeless, oddly dramatic, sweltering-hot and alive with concentration.
Richard Wallwork took life classes at Canterbury College in the best of a very academic and staid tradition. But his talented students, and his inspiration as a teacher, made up for many of the progressive ideas that were missing. One of his cleverest students was Olivia Spencer Bower, a young woman freshly back, in 1919, from art school in Britain. She began classes at the end of Ngaio’s time at Canterbury College. One day she remembered that ‘the model hadn’t turned up & Ngaio was doing the job’.
Mr Wallwork was pushing her around on the Throne mid gales of laughter. It was the personality which intrigues. Then one day I met her outside a painting shop in Colombo Street. She had on an enormous camel hair coat with high collar & great wide shoulders. I came home in rather shocked surprise & said to my mother—do you know she’s beautiful.
Ngaio sat for her artist friends formally and informally. She knew what it was like to be manhandled by someone setting a pose. She could imagine the consequences of a dagger jammed through the back of the bench.
The tempestuous courtship of Alleyn and Troy continues unresolved through Artists in Crime, paralleling the police investigation, and just when the momentum of both is about to founder there is another murder, more hideous and haunting than any before. In Golden Age detective fiction, the horror of decay was usually mitigated by the narrow timeframe, and by makeshift shrouds and the sterile formality of mortuary vans, autopsy tables and coroner’s inquests. But this body, that of free-living artist Garcia, waits days to be discovered, in a dusty garret-like studio in a semi-derelict warehouse in the East End of London. You can almost smell his putrefying corpse in the words she uses. Troy has warned Garcia about his lifestyle. ‘While you’re here you’ve got to behave yourself. You know what I mean?…I won’t have any bogus Bohemianism, or free love, or mere promiscuity at Tatler’s End. It shocks the servants, and it’s messy. All right?’ But Garcia cannot contain himself, and pays for his drug addiction and womanizing with his life.
Troy takes an orthodox stand on an issue Ngaio knew plenty about. Art studio life in Christchurch was bohemian. A sense of sexual freedom and fluidity reigned, and this was the milieu she sought out before and after her trip to England. But this repressed provincial bohemianism had to be circumspect to survive. Through the bedrock of Christchurch ran seams of liberalism, sexual licence, homosexuality and just plain eccentricity, which were known about but not usually discussed. Troy does not judge Garcia’s behaviour; she merely tells him to keep it out of sight.
Artists in Crime was Ngaio’s last title published with Geoffrey Bles. Her agent Edmund Cork negotiated a more favourable contract with Collins, who was also Agatha Christie’s publisher. She left the company that launched her career with reluctance, but the advantages were undeniable. For the next four titles, she would receive an advance of £250 and 15 per cent royalties. From 1940 her American publisher would be Boston-based Little, Brown. In the meantime, Collins was wonderfully convenient because she was there in England to confirm arrangements and sign papers. Over the years, Ngaio established a close friendship with publishing magnate William (Billy) Collins, who in many ways resembled her dapper, well-mannered, well-meaning detective. Things were good for Ngaio. She was in a more lucrative stable with the promise of financial security, and England was an exciting place to be.
She began writing for New Zealand syndicated newspapers under the pen name ‘The Canterbury Pilgrim Again’. Her exhilaration was clear in descriptions of her arrival in spring, which had more significance than New Zealand’s. ‘Here the trees are so long asleep, the fields hard with frost or sodden with the cold winter rains.’ The English countryside was awakening, and she was thrilled to see ‘the pricking of young buds’, the soft blades of new grass like ‘fine hair on the firm margins of hills’, and yellow flowers in cottage gardens and cowslips in the hedgerows.
Her excitement was also there in descriptions of events leading up to the coronation of King George VI in May 1937. ‘On the road outside Camberley we passed troops on their way up to London,’ she told readers. ‘When at last the roads turned finally into streets and scarlet buses joined the thickening stream of traffic, we saw banners hung out from all the windows.’ London was alive with festive buzz and ‘Hyde Park…turned into an enormous camp, with horse lines, tank lines, and rows and rows and rows of army tents’. Hazardous scaffolding was erected to clean huge civic monuments. ‘All that strange bronze and marble population of London will be smartened for the Coronation,’ she wrote. ‘Only the rabbits and mice round Peter Pan’s pedestal in Kensington Gardens have no need of spring cleaning, for they are polished…by small fat hands in woolly gloves…London, like a grand old dowager, puts on her royal colours with an air and prepares to welcome a king.’ Set against this canvas of pomp and ceremony was her private pleasure at meeting the Rhodes family again. It was not long before their lives became enmeshed in the delights of London’s debutante season.
Nelly Rhodes’s daughter Maureen was presented, and Ngaio was invited to ‘coming out’ events that included a Royal Garden Party in June. These occasions provided fascinating slices of upper-class and aristocratic society. She sat with her friend in the chaperones’ corner, a ‘looker-on’, and what she saw became material for another book. ‘For NELLY to whom this book owes its existence,’ she wrote in the dedication to Death in