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Product Description
The Empress of Crime's life was the ultimate detective story – revealed for the first time in this forthright and perceptive biography.
While Ngaio Marsh had a flamboyant public persona, she was fiercely protective of her private life. And no one knows better how to cover tracks with red herrings and remove incriminating evidence than a crime fiction writer…
This fascinating biography of Ngaio Marsh pieces together both the public and private Marsh in a way that is as riveting as a crime novel. Through her writing and her theatre work, Joanne Drayton assembles the pieces to the puzzle that is Marsh, proving that life can be as thrilling as fiction. Marsh wrote her first detective novel in a London flat in the depths of the 1930s Depression, bringing life to Detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn in her first book, A Man Lay Dead. Through 32 novels he would establish himself as one of the great super-sleuths, and Marsh as one of the four Queens of Golden Age detective fiction, alongside Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and Margery Allingham.
In 1932, a family tragedy brought Marsh home to New Zealand, to a life divided - between hemispheres, between passionate relationships at home and abroad, and between the world of publishing and her life as a stage director. In 1949 her writing would earn her the ultimate distinction when Penguin and Collins released the 'Marsh Million': 100,000 copies each of ten of her titles on to the world market. The popular appetite for classic whodunits was insatiable and Ngaio Marsh was one of the best. But her greatest love was the stage - or was it?
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Marsh herself comes over as a private woman with a huge love of the arts, being herself artist, writer, actor and director. She drove the development of New Zealand theatre in the mid 20th century and got a well deserved damehood for both writing and theatre.
This biography draws a lot of information from letters and her own autobiography, together with articles and interviews given by Marsh. In respect of being a good source of information on Marsh, it is fine. However it could have done with a darn good edit, as information is repeated, the order of events is confused with some duplications and some gaps. There is a huge focus on her theatrical productions, with discussion on their merits or otherwise, reviews, thoughts on the production itself. The books are merely described. There seemed to me to be a lot of judgementalism in the author's view of Marsh, speculating constantly about her sexuality and relationships with women. The main evidence for her supposed lesbianism appears to be because she wore mannish outfits. As a six foot rail thin woman these clothes probably suited her!
Still worth a read as a glimpse of this fascinating woman, but I didnt feel that I knew her much better at the end.
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