Margery Allingham hoped she might make a career for herself on the stage. In 1920, she began an acting course at London’s Regent Street Polytechnic. Speech therapy and drama classes cured her childhood stutter, but acting was not the profession for this shy woman who found speaking in public an ordeal. The theatre remained a lifelong passion, and introduced her to Philip Youngman Carter. The pair had their first date at The Old Vic theatre in London. Together they attended countless stage productions, became secretly engaged in 1922, and married in 1928. A love of the theatre linked all the Queens of Crime, but none loved it more than Ngaio Marsh, the last to join this criminal quartet. She may well have sat in the same West End productions as Margery Allingham, but this was not all they shared. Allingham’s The Crime at Black Dudley bears the closest fingerprint to Ngaio Marsh’s A Man Lay Dead. Before she began her murderous weekend’s writing, Ngaio had been reading a detective novel from the local lending library. Later she remembered that it may have been an Agatha Christie or a Dorothy Sayers, but it was probably the residue of Margery Allingham’s plot that stayed in her mind as she wrote.
In The Crime at Black Dudley, a homicide explodes the gaiety of a weekend party in a musty-dusty manor house in remote coastal Suffolk. After dinner, a bejewelled 15th-century Italian dagger is used in a ritual game that has ancient associations with the house. In a blackened room, the blade is passed between guests in a frenzied rite that combines the anxiety of a pass-the-parcel bomb with the sensory deprivation of blind-man’s-buff. When light is restored, the host’s invalid uncle, Colonel Coombe, is found murdered and an important document is missing from his papers; the house guests are held hostage by a criminal gang seeking the document’s return. It is pathologist Dr George Abbershaw who uncovers the killer, assisted by the mysterious Albert Campion. Abbershaw was almost certainly intended to be Allingham’s detective, but he was upstaged by the super-sleuth-spoof, Campion.
Although Ngaio and Allingham have similar plots, their execution is quite different. With each sinister ingredient, Allingham twists the tension of her story tighter. Her mansion is a rotting labyrinth of antique rooms and corridors connected by an ancient network of rat-infested secret passageways. Guests vanish through panelled walls, reappear behind fireplaces and are beaten up by Teutonic henchmen. Her host is a mask-wearing criminal mastermind, and his staff and associates some of Europe’s most villainous thugs. The situation becomes combustible and burn the house nearly does, with the guests locked in an upper chamber. Salvation comes when their desperate choruses of ‘viewhalloo’ attract the Monewdon Hunt. Ngaio’s treatment, by comparison, is blander but more believable. Her suspense hinges on whodunit and how. Already her special talent for visualizing scenes is evident, as is her superb sense of dramatic timing.
In years to come Ngaio Marsh would cringe at the thought of her first novel, with its barely plausible storyline, shallow characterization and confined setting, but it was her entrée to crime fiction writing. In fact, both A Man Lay Dead and The Crime at Black Dudley exemplify the cosy detective novel form perfectly. Claustrophobic in every way, they unfold with a small group of characters, in a single main setting, over a short period of time. The exclusion of the outside world allows the writer to create a controlled environment where clues, red herrings, victims, innocents and villains can be paraded before the reader free of contamination. There can be no loose ends and no escapes. The isolated manor house is a favourite setting, but equally it could be a village, a train, a boat, a hospital, a theatre, or any discrete space that brings a hand-picked group of eccentrics together and locks the door. The cosy comes with a property box of stock characters. There is the prominent family with its multiple tensions, the vamp, the vicar, the rake, the student, the professor, the spinster, the young poseur, the doctor, the adventurer, the foreigner, the writer, the untouched young woman, and, of course, the murderer. For murder it mostly is, because the participants play for the highest stakes: the death penalty. Cosy plots are convoluted, so the reader is presented with a multiplicity of possible scenarios, each stopping at a dead end until the detective leads the way. The detective enters this amphitheatre of anxiety in a sanctified role to restore the balance of good over evil. He or she is neither judge nor executioner but high priest of order, exposing the wrongdoer, who is sacrificed to reaffirm society’s rules. In 1942, writer and critic Nicholas Blake described the detective as ‘the Fairy Godmother of the twentieth century folk-myth’. Certainly this figure played a magical part in one of the century’s favourite bedtime stories.
‘I thought it would be fun to create someone who hadn’t got tickets tied to him,’ explained Ngaio Marsh in a 1978 radio interview for the BBC. She was talking about the genesis of her detective, Roderick Alleyn. She had visited Scotland and while staying with friends selected the popular Scottish name Roderick; and not long before she began writing she went to Dulwich College where her father had gone to school, and chose the surname of its founder, Elizabethan actor Edward Alleyn. So her detective was christened before he was born. His character was gestating in her mind as she tinkered with the coals in her London grate. She was thinking of a more ordinary man than the set of silly-assed sleuths who tweaked waxed moustaches, repositioned monocles or stared blankly over buckteeth. She wanted to create a believable professional policeman who could move comfortably between the lower echelons and upper-class circles where many of her stories would be set. He was to be an ‘attractive, civilised man,’ the kind, she later wrote, ‘with whom it would be pleasant to talk but much less pleasant to fall out’. So Alleyn was born, ‘tall and thin with an accidental elegance about him and a fastidiousness’. His hair is dark, his eyes are grey ‘with corners that turned down. They looked as if they would smile easily, but his mouth didn’t.’ After a long look at her first detective, Sir Hubert Handesley’s niece, Angela North, decides Alleyn is ‘the sort they knew would “do” for house-parties’. He is the younger son of a landed family in Buckinghamshire, has been educated at Eton, employed briefly by the Foreign Office, and now works for the Yard. His brother is a baronet in the diplomatic corps, and his mother, Lady Alleyn of Danes Lodge, Bossicote, breeds Alsatians. His background is impeccable rather than impossible, and his worst habit is his irritating tendency to make banal comments and facetious jokes.
Like his sleuthing peers, Alleyn would mature, but not as much because he began more plausibly. There would be excursions abroad, but his natural habitat would remain the English hothouse cosy where traditional values were just a murder away from being restored. The anarchy of war, the devastation of pandemic, the General Strike of 1926, the Great Depression, and the rise of Communism and Fascism with their catastrophic episodes of genocide never properly enter his cloistered world where a single death can still be utterly shocking.
Explaining the extraordinary demand for the detective novel, Margery Allingham wrote: ‘When the moralists cite the modern murder mystery as evidence of an unnatural love of violence in a decadent age, I wonder if it is nothing of the sort, but rather a sign of a popular instinct for order and form in a period of sudden and chaotic change […] There is something deeply healthy in the implication that to deprive a human being of his life is not only the most dreadful thing one can do to him, but also that it matters to the rest of us.’ Faced with the flux of a rapidly changing world, readers sought intellectual escape in problem plots where sanitized death teased the minds of anyone from a housewife to a judge. While global war and economic slump eroded the class system and beat at the bastions of the family manor house, the detective novel offered fictional stability. Anybody with a stake in the restoration of traditional order was a potential reader. The detective novel portrayed a world of proscriptive hierarchies and reassuring ritual. It assumed a reasoned universe based on polarities of right and wrong where anarchy occasionally erupted but normality was always restored. And no one could be a more chivalrous representative of the status quo than that ‘perfect specimen of English manhood’, Roderick Alleyn.
As an orderly man in an ordered form, he required little personal revelation from Ngaio Marsh. Like the other Queens of Crime, Ngaio shunned uncomfortable publicity. She seemed largely conformist, from a conservative background, writing in an era when women were expected to behave conventionally. The crime novel kept up appearances by preserving