Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime by Joanne Drayton Read Free Book Online

she expected of her principal characters was that they seemed ‘real and alive’, and this is what she felt she had done with aplomb in Death on the Nile. She also cleverly evoked the Middle East. Christie shared Ngaio’s passion for travel and her most interesting settings were taken from her real-life experiences. ‘To Sybil Burnett who also loves wandering the world’ she wrote in the dedication to Death on the Nile.
    Writing was a portable occupation that an upper-middle-class wife could do while she accompanied her husband. Remarkably, Christie always saw Mallowan’s profession as an archaeologist as more important than her own as a writer. She was openly mercenary about what she did: she wrote now to make money. Mallowan’s archaeological digs were expensive and at times financed from their own pockets. But she believed that her role as a wife was her principal occupation. Perhaps this is why she never floated Hercule Poirot’s paddle steamer with anything more than murder.
    For Ngaio, the English country village had some of the same sense of strangeness that the Nile had for Christie. Overture to Death came out of her time with Nelly Rhodes in the wintry south of England. ‘The upland air was cold after the stuffiness of the car. It smelt of dead leaves and frost.’ Alleyn notes the physical presence of winter as he steps out of the car in the Vale-of-Pen-Cuckoo, just as Ngaio would have noticed it at the tail end of her 1937-38 trip.
    He has been called in to investigate a most unlikely murder, which has occurred at a Pen-Cuckoo fund-raising performance of a well-known West End play. The greying Idris Campanula is called upon at the last moment to stand in as pianist for her aging rival for the vicar’s affection, Eleanor Prentice, who is distraught. The victorious Campanula sits down at the keyboard to begin her pièce de r é sistance, Rachmaninoff’s ‘Prelude in C.’ She holds her bony left hand in the air. Then down it comes. ‘Pom. Pom. POM. The three familiar pretentious chords.’ Then she puts her left foot on the soft pedal, and it happens.
The air was blown into splinters of atrocious clamour. For a second nothing existed but noise—hard racketing noise. The hall, suddenly thick with dust, was also thick with a cloud of intolerable sound. And, as the dust fell, so thepandemonium abated and separated into recognisable sources. Women were screaming. Chair legs scraped…the piano hummed like a gigantic top.
    Miss Campanula slumps forward and her face slides down the sheet of music. She has been shot between the eyes by a ‘Heath-Robinson-style-gadget’ rigged inside the piano. It is a childish prank of village bad-boy Georgie Biggins, who has set up an ingenious system of strings and pulleys to fire a water pistol at one of the unsuspecting spinsters. But the murderer has exchanged the child’s water pistol for a Colt 32.
    The tension that holds this English cosy together is ‘jealousy rooted in sex’. Eleanor Prentice is a thin, bloodless, bucktoothed woman of about 49. Idris Campanula, her buxom foe, is a large-framed, hot-flushed, wire-haired woman of equal antiquity. One is sanctimonious, the other arrogant, and they are rampant for the vicar, who holds them at bay with holy conversation which, on one horrible occasion, in a private moment with Idris Campanula, abandons him completely. As the vicar explains to Alleyn, she misunderstands his silence.
The next moment she was, to be frank, in my arms. It was without any exception the most awful thing that has ever happened to me. She was sobbing and laughing at the same time. I was in agony. I couldn’t release myself.
    Ngaio knew exactly how awkward that experience could be because she’d had it in the headmistress’s office at St Margaret’s. ‘It’s beastly for you,’ says Alleyn, ‘but I’m sure you should tell me’, and he is right, because this is the trigger for the murder. It is Ngaio’s vivid picture of the sexual