Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime. Joanne Drayton

heard the snatches of society gossip and learned the debutante rules, which were strict and established, but the idea for the murder had another source.

      ‘The facts of the case are simply these,’ wrote Fergus Hume in the opening chapter of The Mystery of a Hansom Cab. ‘On the twenty-seventh day of July, at the hour of twenty minutes to two o’ clock in the morning, a hansom cab drove up to the police station, in Grey Street, St Kilda, and the driver made the startling statement that his cab contained the body of a man whom he had reason to believe had been murdered.’ The murderer wore an overcoat over his evening dress and a large soft felt hat that concealed his face. These clothes were identical to those of the victim. At the coroner’s inquest, an expert witness confirmed that the victim had died from the inhalation of chloroform from a handkerchief held over his mouth. The victim’s heart was flaccid with a ‘tendency to fatty degeneration’, and that accelerated the fatal result.

      It was a brilliant concept—a hansom cab was so public and yet so private. Hume understood that it was the perfect place for a murder because the crime could be concealed from the driver seated outside, who was the only witness. Ngaio realized that a horseless cab driven in London in 1937 could be equally secluded. Lord Robert Gospell, known to his friends as Bunchy, is doing undercover work for Roderick Alleyn. Bunchy, an effete, aging, aristocratic party animal who minces his way unremarkably through London’s upper echelons, has worked for Scotland Yard before. He is an ideal plant to bust a blackmail ring, and a personal friend of Alleyn’s, so when he is discovered dead in a London taxi it gives the detective a terrible jolt.

      Ring, ring, ring goes the telephone. He wakes up with a start. It is four o’clock in the morning and Alleyn has nodded off in his room at the Yard. He picks up the receiver and a disembodied voice says: ‘There’s a case come in, sir. I thought I’d better report to you at once. Taxi with a fare. Says the fare’s been murdered and has driven straight here with the body.’ Alleyn goes downstairs, thinking all the time of Bunchy and his blackmail ring. He cannot understand it: Bunchy was supposed to telephone and report in. Alleyn is greeted at the entrance by the uniformed sergeant on duty. ‘Funny sort of business, Mr Alleyn…The cabby insists it was murder and won’t say a word till he sees you.’ Alleyn opens the door of the cab, turns on the dim roof light, and there is Bunchy, dead.

      Alleyn reels in shock. When he recovers a little, he asks the cabby why he is so sure it was murder.

      ‘Gorblimy, governor,’ said the driver, ‘ain’t I seen wiv me own eyes ‘ow the ovver bloke gets in wiv ‘im, and ain’t I seen wiv me own eyes ‘ow the ovver bloke gets out at ‘is lordship’s ‘ouse dressed up in ‘is lordship’s cloak and ‘at and squeaks at me in a rum little voice same as ‘is lordship.’

      Bunchy has been asphyxiated with his cloak, and a consultation with Bunchy’s doctor, Sir Daniel Davidson, confirms that Bunchy was ill: a healthy man might die in about four minutes, a man with a heart condition could take less than two, and Bunchy possibly died almost immediately.

      The parallels between Ngaio’s and Hume’s murders are obvious, but beyond the basic framework of the killings, the stories develop differently. Hume’s novel predated Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock mystery by a year, and Simon Caterson, in his introduction to The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, argues that they spearheaded two very different directions in crime fiction. ‘Where Conan Doyle concentrates on the establishing of the character of his protagonist, Hume’s detectives Gorby and Kilsip are merely two players within an ensemble of actors.’ Hume used his mystery to explore the world in which his characters lived rather than developing any one of them into a super-sleuth.

      The Queens of Golden Age crime wrote in the Conan Doyle tradition, but in Death in a White Tie Ngaio broke away from the conventional model. This mystery was much more a commentary on human behaviour and social mores. It had a super-sleuth at its centre, but also a flavour of what Hume achieved with his anatomizing vision of society. Ngaio’s criticism of the rhetorical aspects of the class system and her latent cynicism about the debutante process pushed boundaries. One of the most frequently made, and perhaps most valid, criticisms of Golden Age crime fiction was its class-consciousness and cultural bias. There can be no denying the fact that Death in a White Tie was a highly Anglo-centric detective novel, but it was also critical of the hierarchies that support class difference. Ngaio’s attitude to snobbery was clear—she disliked it. Her least appealing characters are the most pretentious. General Halcut-Hackett is classic regiment. To meet him, Alleyn ‘walked through a hall which, though it had no tongue, yet it did speak of the most expensive and most fashionable house decorator in London’. Halcut-Hackett’s study is permeated by the smell of leather and cigars; his face is ‘terra-cotta, his moustache formidable, his eyes china blue. He was the original ramrod brass-hat, the subject of all army jokes kindly or malicious. It was impossible to believe his mind was as blank as his face would seem to confess.’ But of course it is.