Ngaio was the only Antipodean Crime Queen, and although she often left New Zealand’s parochial fish bowl, she never escaped it. This made her, as she described it, ‘a looker on in England’. But she was also something of an Anglophile outsider at home. Colonization creates cultural refugees and Ngaio was one of these, a wanderer between worlds, never belonging completely to any place or culture. But displacement does not explain the intensity of her need for privacy. In 32 novels written over nearly 50 years, she exposed countless villains, but never herself. She was a doyenne of concealment, knowing exactly what evidence was incriminating and who would point the finger. There are, however, clues to understanding this complex and elusive woman. Ngaio felt strong emotions. ‘I guess I fell in love with them,’ she said of the aristocratic family she stayed with in Britain, and love is as good a place as any to begin a mystery.
Ngaio’s rusty freighter-cum-passenger ship steamed up the Thames, docking at Tilbury in the early summer of 1928. She was ecstatic about her first visit to England. ‘We were bewilderingly gay,’ she remembered, ‘I got the tag end of a very ravished but very wonderful 1920s in London.’ She went immediately to stay with her friends Helen and Tahu Rhodes, and their burgeoning family of five children. On her arrival at their magnificent Georgian mansion, Ngaio was greeted by a joke ‘For Sale on Easy Terms’ sign, which set the tone of her stay. Ngaio found the Rhodes family’s theatricality, their irrepressible enthusiasm for practical jokes, for putting on costumes, for making up and acting up, irresistible. She would live with them on and off while in England; first at Alderbourne Manor near Gerrards Cross in Buckinghamshire, and later in London.
This would become a ménage à trois of sorts, held together by the infatuation of the two women. Helen, known as Nelly, was the eldest daughter of Lord Plunket, who had been Governor of New Zealand from 1904 to 1910. In 1916, she married her handsome soldier husband, Captain Tahu Rhodes, at an English church packed with wounded soldiers who had been driven to the service in Red Cross vehicles from the New Zealand hospital at Walton-on-Thames.
The pattern of Ngaio’s weekend stays with the couple had begun when they returned to New Zealand at the end of the First World War. Tahu Rhodes, a childhood friend, owned Meadowbank, a large sheep station at Ellesmere, about 30 kilometres south-east of her hometown of Christchurch. Through her fund-raising activities in the theatre, Ngaio picked up the threads of her acquaintance with Tahu and was introduced to his wife, Nelly. The women’s friendship became lifelong and binding.
In New Zealand, Ngaio had wandered listlessly from one touring theatre production to another, searching for something permanent and sustaining. She had acted in, written and directed plays; she had been to art school and produced paintings for exhibitions; she had written articles for the Sun newspaper. But after the Rhodeses’ return to England in 1927, her enthusiasm for bit-jobs diminished in direct proportion to her desire to travel ‘Home’. Much more than a literal home, England was for her a cultural pantheon presided over by her giant of literary gods, William Shakespeare. When it came, the invitation from the Rhodeses burst like a blaze of fireworks across a night sky. She was rapturous. Her parents were the only tug on her emotions. However, her doting bank-clerk father, Henry Marsh, and his economizing wife, Rose, magnanimously scrambled to pay their only child’s passage to England. It meant a more spartan life than usual, but the opportunity for Ngaio to travel and stay with such illustrious friends abroad was impossible to miss.
Alderbourne, with its vast number of rooms and workforce—which included a butler, a footman, a full domestic staff, plus a nanny and a lady’s maid—was a shock for Ngaio. The Rhodes family had returned to England to economize. They had found their big house, large staff and lavish life of weekend parties unsustainable in New Zealand. To Ngaio, however, Alderbourne Manor seemed luxurious. She waited for the ominous day when the Rhodes family ‘bandwagon’, as she called it, with its English ‘rebore’ and fresh ‘coat of paint’, lurched into another period of desperate insolvency. In the meantime, she took her seat.
A photograph taken on a Rhodes family holiday in Kent shows the easy comfort of the family group and their coterie of perpetual guests. Four high-spirited children, wearing swimsuits, sit in the front row with a favourite dog, while another is carried piggyback. Behind them are the adults, in soft suits that pull and pucker. On the far right, slightly apart, stands Tahu Rhodes. He was a captain in the Grenadier Guards, and there is still a trace of formality in the slicked-back black hair, prominent moustache and heavy-featured, swarthy good looks. Beside him is the crop-haired, trouser-clad, boyish figure of Ngaio. She was nearly 6 feet (1.8 metres) tall, and even in her 30s she carried the imprint of youth and a touch of the awkward teenager in her lanky stature. She was striking, with strong rather than conventionally beautiful features, a prominent nose, dark close-set eyes and tightly wavy dark hair. Toppy Blundell Hawkes stands open-faced and smiling between Ngaio and Nelly. He was a good-natured English farm cadet who became a favourite after staying with the Rhodes family in New Zealand. Nelly is squat and somewhat plain, but the warmth of her personality is evident in her face, which beams broadly. A 1920s hat is pulled down tightly on her head, and she is wearing a full-length, flecked dress-suit, which is comfortable rather than elegant. What is evident in the photograph is their delight at being together on holiday.
Ngaio joined the Society of Authors, and at Alderbourne Manor, in the midst of a noisy household of children, wrote syndicated accounts of her travels for newspapers in New Zealand. She hoped journalism would make her more independent of her parents’ finances. The first of many articles, under the pen name ‘A New Canterbury Pilgrim’, was published in the Christchurch Press on 1 September 1928. She began by describing her departure from New Zealand. ‘I know of no experience that compares with the adventure of setting out on one’s travels…for me, at least, the office of Thomas Cook and Son, Christchurch, will always be the enchanted parlour whose doors open straight into Wonderland.’ Like many creative colonial women of her generation, Ngaio felt travelling to Britain and Europe was like slipping into a magical parallel universe. New Zealand offered few opportunities in writing, art or the theatre, and, for women particularly, these were isolating, often desperate pursuits. Even after the First World War, remnants of Victorian provincialism hung like a miasma over cities such as Christchurch. Expatriate Australian artist and writer Stella Bowen described Christchurch’s sister city Adelaide as ‘a queer little backwater of intellectual timidity’ which, ‘isolated by three immense oceans…lies…prettyish, banal, and filled to the brim with an anguish of boredom’. This was what Ngaio felt she was leaving. It was also a chance to escape the confines of her relationship with her parents, to become independent—an adult even—and define herself as someone new.
Her first stop on the long sea voyage, which would take nearly eight weeks, was Sydney, where she witnessed a half-span of the harbour bridge going up. She saw a production of Henry VIII put on in Newton by her old actor-manager friend Allan Wilkie, and went to the city’s ‘grandiloquent’ state gallery which stands on a hill flanked by giant statues of snorting steeds bearing symbolic figures of ‘war and peace’. In the English section of the gallery, she was taken by the work of Impressionist Laura Knight, and in the Australian, by the Post-Impressionist Margaret Preston. ‘They are brilliantly painted,’ she wrote of Preston’s stilllifes, ‘they seem to reveal the very spirit of flowers without a touch of over-representation or sentimentality. Her sense of pattern is…inspiring.’ In the colonies Ngaio’s taste in art was modern, and her discussion of Preston perceptive, but in European centres that had wrestled with Cubist deconstruction, Dada nihilism and the psychosis of Surrealism, it was traditional. Her final visit was to the new Cabaret-Romanos, where she found heterogeneous humanity dancing cheek-to-cheek to the ‘muted “Blues” of the best Jazz in Sydney’.
In Hobart, she shuddered at photographs of the ‘dreadful instruments’ of penal correction used in the former convict prison and noted the sad demise of Aboriginal culture in the face of English settlement. She found Melbourne cooler and more decorous than hot-blooded, sun-baked Sydney. Here she again visited the state gallery,