The directory «Plots»

Marsh Ngaio
(1899—1982)

Dame Ngaio Marsh DBE, born Edith Ngaio Marsh was an author and theatre director from New Zealand. There is some uncertainty over her birth date as her father neglected to register her birth until 1900.

Ngaio Marsh was educated at St Margaret's College in Christchurch, New Zealand, where she was a foundation pupil. She studied painting at the Canterbury College School of Art before becoming an actress with the Allan Wilkie company touring New Zealand. From 1928 onward she divided her time between living in the United Kingdom and in her native New Zealand. She was knighted as a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1966.
Internationally she is best known for her 32 detective novels published between 1934 and 1982. Along with Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham and Dorothy L. Sayers, she was classed as one of the four original "Queens of Crime"—female British crime writers who dominated the crime fiction genre in the Golden Age of the 1920s and 1930s.

All her books feature British CID detective Roderick Alleyn. Several novels feature Marsh's other loves, the theatre («Vintage Murder», «Final Curtain», «Light Thickens», «Death at the Dolphin») and painting. Alleyn marries a painter, Agatha Troy, whom he meets during an investigation.

Most are set in England, but four are set in New Zealand, with Alleyn on secondment to the New Zealand police («Vintage Murder», «Colour Scheme», «Died in the Wool»), or on holiday («Photo Finish»).

Marsh's first love, however, was the theatre, and in New Zealand she is remembered more for her theatrical endeavours than her detective fiction. In 1942 she produced a modern-dress «Hamlet» for the Canterbury University College Drama Society (now UCDS), the first of many Shakespearean productions with the society until 1969. In 1944, «Hamlet» and a production of «Othello» toured a theatre-starved New Zealand to rapturous acclaim. In 1949, assisted by entrepreneur Dan O'Connor, her student players toured Australia with a new version of «Othello» and Pirandello's «Six Characters in Search of an Author». In the 1950s she was involved with the New Zealand Players, a relatively short-lived attempt at a national professional touring repertory company.

She lived long enough to see New Zealand with a viable professional theatre industry with realistic Arts Council support, with many of her protégés to the forefront. The 430-seat Ngaio Marsh Theatre at the University of Canterbury is named in her honour.

She never married or had children. Ngaio Marsh published a lyrical but not very revealing autobiography, «Black Beech & Honeydew» in 1965. British author and publisher Margaret Lewis wrote an authorized biography, «Ngaio Marsh, A Life» in 1991.

New Zealand, 1989, Ngaio Marsh