Literate. Polished. Witty. Urbane. These words describe the traditional English mystery and, above all, the novels of Dame Ngaio Marsh (1899-1982). Paradoxically, Marsh was born and reared far from England and had little interest in detective fiction as a form. “These are not the sort of books I buy to read,” she said of the works of other mystery novelists. Her real interests were painting and the theater. But perhaps all of this is not so surprising: she brought to her writing the clearsightedness of an outsider—an outsider who could view a scene as a painter and plot with the dramatic sense of a playwright.

Edith Ngaio Marsh was born in Christchurch, New Zealand. Her father came from England, but her mother was from a family that was basically colonial, having come to New Zealand by way of the West Indies. Marsh explained to an interviewer many years later that in New Zealand European children often receive native names, and Ngaio — the name by which she was known all her life — can mean either “light on the water” or “little tree bug” in the Maori language. Other sources say that it is the name of a native flowering tree. Whatever the case, Marsh found whenever she was outside New Zealand that her name was constantly mispronounced “Ner-gy-oh,” rather than the correct “Nye-oh.” At the age of fifteen, she entered art school and planned a career as a painter. While a student, she attended a performance of Allan Wilkie’s Shakespeare Company, and sent him a playscript called The Medallion. Wilkie did not produce the play, but he was so impressed that for two years Marsh worked for his company.

In 1928 when she was almost thirty, Marsh went to London with friends around whom she would base the Lampreys, a family that would be featured in many of her stories. For a while, she wrote syndicated articles for publication back in New Zealand and, as she later recalled, began “to develop some appreciation, at least, for cadence and the balance of words.” She and one of the Lampreys decided to open a shop called Touch and Go to sell various handcrafts — decorated trays, bowls, lampshades, and even “funny rhymes for bathroom and lavatory doors.”

While trying to keep the shop going, Marsh filled in odd moments in writing her first book, a detective novel called A Man Lay Dead. Details of its composition and the invention of Inspector Roderick Alleyn are given in Marsh’s essay, “Roderick Alleyn,” which begins this book. Shortly after finishing the manuscript, she had to return to New Zealand to attend her mother’s ultimately fatal illness, but her English agent arranged for the book to be published in 1934. In later years, Marsh grew disenchanted with A Man Lay Dead. In her autobiography, Black Beech and Honeydew, she remarked that “I don’t think that before or since… I have ever written with less trouble and certainly with less distinction.”

“It wasn’t very good,” she said to an interviewer, “and sometimes [I] wish it could be withdrawn. I don’t like the title even. It sounds awfully like ‘A Man-Laid Egg.’ ” To modern readers Alleyn seems something of a twit on his first appearance, as is evident from his very first words: “You’ve guessed my boyish secret. I’ve been given a murder to solve—aren’t I a lucky little detective?” And the solution—involving the murderer sliding down a bannister toward the victim—does not have the subtlety of her later books. Enter a Murderer (1935), written in New Zealand while Marsh was keeping house for her father, was a marked improvement, perhaps because it was based on her first love, the theater, but Alleyn still talks like one of the “bright young things” of the 1920s. His first words in this book are: “Perhaps he knew me. I’m as famous as anything, you know… An actor in his dressing-room will thrill me to mincement. I shall sit and goggle at him, I promise you.” Though in each successive book Marsh gradually deepened his character, Alleyn does not become truly believable until he meets his future wife, the painter Agatha Troy, in Artists in Crime (1938).

Marsh said that she got the idea of writing a detective story while reading a novel by Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayers. I suspect it was one of Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey novels, for Sayers’s influence is manifest throughout Marsh’s early books. Sayers had developed a formula that soon was used by many other writers. Her cases are solved by Lord Peter Wimsey, an aristocratic amateur sleuth who collects books and who fills his talk with obscure quotations. He is assisted by his man, Bunter, and by Inspector Parker, a competent but unimaginative Scotland Yard official. Other writers who used the bright amateur/stolid professional combination included Miles Burton, Max Afford, Rupert Penny, Margery Allingham, John Dickson Carr, Ianthe Jerrold, and H. C. Bailey. Ngaio Marsh varied the formula, but only slightly. Roderick Alleyn is a professional, but he begins as a literary cousin to Lord Peter. Alleyn is the scion of an old aristocratic family, and his mother, Lady Alleyn, seems almost a clone of Lord Peter’s mother, the Dowager Duchess of Denver. Even in Marsh’s middle-period novels, such as A Wreath for Rivera (1949), Alleyn addresses his assistant, Inspector Fox, in Wimsey-like language: “Fox, my cabbage, my rare edition, my objet d’art, my own especial bit of bijouterie.” Fox himself is not only much like Parker and other Scotland Yard detectives who assist aristocratic sleuths, but he also shares some characteristics with Wimsey’s servant, Bunter. He is especially good at obtaining information below stairs, in the servants’ quarters. And like Wimsey, Alleyn falls in love with a suspect in one of his cases and marries her in a later novel.

Whenever the matter came up, Marsh said that she did not follow Sayers in falling in love with her detective. I think that she did. Or at any rate, she identified with Alleyn’s wife: “People who know me very well see me in her. Agatha Troy’s tastes are mine and of course she’s a painter and I started off as a painter.” And viewing Alleyn through Troy’s eyes made him much less the effete aristocrat that he often seemed to be in the early novels. By the time that Marsh brought him to New Zealand to help the local authorities in Colour Scheme (1943) and Died in the Wool (1945), Alleyn has gained sensitivity and sympathy. Though he may have emerged from Lord Peter Wimsey, he had become the spiritual ancestor of Ruth Rendell’s Wexford and P. D. James’s Dalgliesh.

The fact that Alleyn is a policeman has led some scholars to write that “in most cases he relies on routine police procedure.” In fact, although Alleyn has fingerprint experts and photographers who investigate the scene of the crime, technical matters are rarely described and the solutions are almost never discovered by such means. Marsh’s books are part of the Golden Age tradition, in which crimes are solved by clues given to the reader and the murders are frequently bizarre. In Marsh’s books, bodies are hidden in bales of wool, and victims are dispatched by guns lurking inside pianos, by lethal wine bottles, and by poisoned darts. Although not particularly interested in the form of detective fiction, she nonetheless followed it almost religiously. She explained that “the mechanics in a detective novel may be shamelessly contrived but the writing need not be so nor, with one exception, need the characterisation. About the guilty person, of course, endless duplicity is practised.” In 1981, I wrote to Ngaio Marsh about research I was doing into the life of another mystery novelist. I received a friendly letter in which—as an aside—she mentioned that “at the moment I am deeply involved with a very elaborate case that I have funked until now. It has become more and more elaborate and the unknotting of clues has never been one of my talents.” Some current writers who share Marsh’s difficulties in handling clues have solved the problem by ignoring clues altogether. It says much for Marsh’s adherence to the form that she was willing to struggle with clueing, and she produced books as well structured and as fair to the reader as any of the Golden Age.