The Queen of Gothic Crime Transcript
Caroline: Detective novelists have always enjoyed flirting with the supernatural. In a genre built on a foundation of logic and deduction, there is nothing more satisfying than dangling the possibility of the uncanny and inexplicable, only to reveal the true rational solution at the end. Some authors in particular made a specialty of this technique: John Dickson Carr was a notable practitioner of this dark art, for instance, as was Gladys Mitchell.
One author who deeply engaged with this detective fiction tradition was Ngaio Marsh. Although perhaps best known for her theatrical mysteries and her suave Scotland Yard sleuth, Roderick Alleyn, she nonetheless had a killer instinct for the creepy, uncanny and macabre.
And so, today, we're going to look a little closer at the work of the queen of gothic crime.
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Welcome to Shedunnit. I'm Caroline Crampton.
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I called Ngaio Marsh "the queen of gothic crime", and that word "gothic" is a good place to start. What does it mean?
Alex: So often when you say the word gothic, what it brings to mind for people is an aesthetic. So darkness, castles, vampires, maybe even corsets, something that's very kind of romantic. But there is a core meaning to the gothic in terms of the gothic as a literary movement, and that is to do with something dark and something difficult to understand, which comes through and challenges the civilised order. That comes from this understanding of the gothic from the fall of the Roman Empire, where the classical was destroyed by this force of disorder and chaos. So when you're looking at gothic literature, it's about the past that won't stay buried. It's about a challenge to human order and sometimes that order is based on injustice or vanity. So that challenge needs to happen by something that's primal and dark. Something other and outside the light and orderly world.
Caroline: This is Alex Clark, a writer as well as a lifelong fan of both Ngaio Marsh and classic Gothic fiction. She has her own Gothic mystery novel, Dovecombe, coming out next year, so she knows what she's talking about. Just as golden age detective fiction has been influencing crime fiction for a century now, the Gothic also has a long history in literary culture.
Alex: The gothic literary emerges in the middle of the 18th century. And it comes through with works like Horace Walpole's Castle of Atranto would be one of the early works and Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho. It's already very well established by the end of the 18th century, and it's not until the 19th century that we start to see what we think of as the classics of the Gothic. You've got Frankenstein would be the first quarter of the 19th century, and then Dracula's not written until 1897. So really a literary genre with a very long run time. So much so that something I find very funny is that Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen quite often pops up in lists of gothic books you should read. It's not actually a gothic book, it's a satire of the Gothic. The whole joke is that nothing gothic happens in it, that the protagonist is obsessed with gothic novels and she thinks that she's in one and she isn't. In fact, she's in a Jane Austen novel and she ends up looking a bit silly. But Jane Austen wrote that book because she was very over the gothic. She thought it was quite ridiculous. And she finished that book in, I think it was 1799. It wasn't published till 1818, but she finished it in 1799. So even at that point, the Gothic was such a phenomenon that Jane Austen was writing a book that was a pushback against the Gothic.
Caroline: Particular periods in history seem to produce more Gothic fiction than others, Alex says.
Alex: I think the reason that the Gothic has such longevity is it's a genre that talks about the breakthrough of something other into the orderly world, and it tends to occur in waves in reaction to periods in which we feel in society that things are settled, understood, and orderly. So when we have one of those periods, there tends to be a little lull in gothic. And then as we enter a period of instability, there tends to be an uptick in gothic because gothic is a way of expressing our uncertainties and our fears. And that can also connect to the way that the gothic other, the thing that's coming through and challenging order whether it wins or not. So in some gothic fiction, the thing that breaks through will be overcome and put back in its place. And you can see that, for instance, in the monster and alien movies of 1950s America, where the thing, the alien, the thing from the lagoon is a very transparent stand-in for communism and therefore has to be defeated and put back in its place. But that's the gothic other that's coming through there, a spectre of this different political order that might come and infect people and make them dangerous within their communities, and it has to always be defeated. Whereas in a book like The Yellow Wallpaper, which is a classic gothic feminist text, the heroine is ultimately defeated by the force of madness that comes on her, because of her imprisonment in this patriarchal system. So the Gothic is this really interesting lens through which we can look at what troubles us, what's the past that won't stay buried. What's the injustice that demands to be seen? What are we scared of as a society?
Caroline: The golden age murder mystery has its own relationship with justice and the breakdown of order, of course. A major distinguishing feature of this type of crime fiction is its focus on the removal of destabilising forces by the end of the book — murderers are caught, ghosts are busted, and liars are exposed.
Alex: I think that in most golden age detective fiction, you do often get gothic elements coming through. But because you've got that need, particularly in the interim post-war period for there to be light, order, civilisation, resolution, those gothic elements are normally put firmly back in their box and they're disproven. There's a human cause behind them. And that human cause can be addressed and resolved and everything needs to be neatly restored in a moral way. I think often they're just used for colour, for atmosphere. I think you've spoken in previous episodes about Agatha Christie's use of the Gothic in a book like Hallowe'en Party, where she was obviously influenced by the popularity of macabre fiction at the time that she wrote that. So sometimes authors are including those gothic elements because they're fun and because they are fashionable perhaps at the time. And because they're gripping and we all love a ghost story, we all love the prospect of something spooky happening, it's very appealing in the story. But ultimately in most golden age detective fiction, it's window dressing and it follows roughly what I would call the Scooby-Doo plot pattern, which is that it appears to be something supernatural happening, but the detective will take off the mask and reveal underneath it that it's actually something very human. And also according to the rules of a detective novel, you can't have a supernatural part to a plot. The solution must be explicable through ordinary means.
Caroline: This "Scooby-Doo" pattern is definitely what we see in John Dickson Carr, for instance — he was incredible at creating a highly spooky plot, only to have one of his two very rational men detectives, Gideon Fell and Henry Merrivale, reveal how it was all really done through human cunning and trickery. Ngaio Marsh, though, had a different approach.
Alex: So I've loved Ngaio Marsh ever since I was quite small. My mum had a big collection of Ngaio Marsh books and I started reading them probably when I was in my early teens. And it's only recently as I've become a gothic author myself that I've started to realise exactly how gothic a lot of her books are. And I think that's why I've continued to love them as I've grown up. I haven't put them aside as I've put aside other authors that I was obsessed with when I was younger. And I think she herself was fascinated by the gothic.
Caroline: Ngaio Marsh was born in 1895 in Christchurch, New Zealand, and would go on to publish 32 crime novels during her long writing career. Although she always called New Zealand's South Island home, she also made regular visits to the UK and Europe, and was inducted into the Detection Club in London in 1974. As I said at the start, she is probably best remembered today for the crime fiction she set in the world of the theatre — actors, producers, directors and playwrights are regular characters for her. Marsh was herself a keen actor and theatre director. And this, not her crime fiction, Alex tells me, has the most to do with her gothic leanings.
Alex: Shakespeare and the performance of Shakespeare was really what she considered her first life's work. The books were something that she did for fun and something that she did to earn money. But she was really in love with Shakespeare. And that's particularly interesting in the context of the Gothic because Gothic as a literary movement and Shakespeare as Britain's national poet as we know him today, were born together at the same time in the 18th century. And prior to the middle of the 18th century, Shakespeare hadn't had much play, he wasn't much spoken about. And then you get this elevation of Shakespeare to this, almost mythical proportion in the middle of the 18th century, people become obsessed with his plays, with performing them. And he becomes very respectable. He is the greatest poet and playwright that there ever was.
And at the same time, you get this new literary movement, which is interested in playing with these ideas of the supernatural and of fate and drama. And this literary movement needs to legitimise itself. And so it openly draws on the works of Shakespeare because in Shakespeare, these things are happening. There are ghosts, there are witches, there are omens, there are curses. There's all this wonderful stuff that the gothic wants to play with. But at the time, Gothic is being dismissed as monstrous, immature, and cheap thrills. But if they can link themselves to Shakespeare, then suddenly they become legitimate. So in The Castle of Atranto by Horace Walpole, which is one of those really early gothic texts from the middle of the 18th century, he is openly referencing Hamlet. He uses bits of the plot of Hamlet, and he references it in his foreword to the book saying, this is a homage to Shakespeare. So I think that Ngaio includes the Gothic in her books, partly because she was so immersed in Shakespeare and also because of the person that she was.
Caroline: So there is a strong theatrical and Shakespearean flavour to Ngaio Marsh's gothic taste. It's also something that came from within her: she was a highly sensitive child, and her mother had "second sight", something that Ngaio seemed to have believed in absolutely. Although she wasn't particular religious as an adult, she had an intensely Catholic phase in her teens, around the same time that she developed a strong taste for reading macabre, chilling fiction. She was particularly keen on The Ingoldsby Legends, a selection of pastiche ghost stories, myths and legends that were first published as a book in 1840, and their influence can still be felt in her crime fiction decades later.
Another key aspect of Marsh's engagement with the Gothic was the way that she wrote crime fiction. She put the emphasis on people and places, rather than puzzles. Here's Alex again.
Alex: A lot of fiction and especially detective fiction, is primarily interested in plot because that's the puzzle that entertains us and keeps us gripped. And a writer like Agatha Christie, I would say, was an incredible writer of plot, but a less good writer of character. Whereas Ngaio says in her autobiography that she always found it quite difficult to not let her love of character run away with her. These people are so real to her in her books that she has to stop herself and think no, do put a plot in. I think she has also a tremendous eye for scene and atmosphere. If you read her and you think about the theatre, you can tell that she's writing as if she's seeing it on a stage. She's writing it as it would be staged. The way that she picks out every character's position in a room, the lighting, their tiny mannerisms you can tell that she is, she's someone who has had a lot to do with the stage.
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Caroline: There are several novels that encapsulate Ngaio Marsh's character-driven, theatrical approach to the Gothic, and we're going to take a look at each of them in turn. First up, her 1941 novel Surfeit of Lampreys, which is probably the one most directly influenced by The Ingoldsby Legends. It's a personal book, too: the chaotic, aristocratic Lamprey family around which the book revolves was based on a real family that Ngaio Marsh spent time with in England, and New Zealander character Roberta Grey is clearly a version of Marsh herself. It's theatrical — at one point, the Lamprey children act out the Old Testament tale of Jael and Sisera — and gruesomely gothic, with the first murder victim being skewered through the eye. The victim's wife, coincidentally, seems to be an actual witch.
Alex: It is fantastically gothic. I think she's having an enormous amount of fun with it. It's a very macabre book. Something really awful happens with a coffin and a bone saw. At the very end of the book, there's a scene where the whole house is dark and something awful is happening and it really is full-blooded gothic and it draws on that Shakespearean tradition. Lady Violet is said to be a witch in the book. She's a witch straight from Macbeth, I would say. So there's that stage influence there again. That character has that obsessive, mad belief in the occult that is at the heart of the Gothic. And it makes the book much more frightening. I think that it's not being done consciously as a ruse that there is in that dark enclosed space with them, this force of madness and terror.
Caroline: I can confirm, the climactic passages where the characters are locked in a dark London townhouse with a corpse, a witch and a severed hand, are very creepy, in a way that is not diminished at all by the solution of the mystery.
In our next example, Death in Ecstasy from 1936, Marsh ventures even further into the weird and the occult.
Alex: So Death in Ecstasy which is one of those earlier books, it's 1936 this is published so it's really early. So we've got Esoteric Cult we've got Ritual Sex, and we've got drugs. This is quite hot stuff in the 1930s. The novel starts with Nigel Bathgate looking out of his window on a rainy night. And he sees that there is a sign for a new strange church just down the road. And he sees all the characters arriving. And he thinks, oh, I'll pop down there and I'll see what this is about. And he pops down there and finds this very strange pagan cult, which seems to combine elements of Wicca with elements of Norse mythology and all kinds of strange bits and bobs and centres around a a form of communion ritual with everyone drinking from the same cup which is all presided over by someone called Father Garnette. Isn't it a wonderful name? Jasper Garnette. And of course things go very badly and a death happens.
Caroline: Father Garnette's cult is called the Temple of the Sacred Flame, and as Marsh's Scotland Yard detective Roderick Alleyn begins to investigate it, he finds all sorts of sins going on there.
Alex: Cults are a classic gothic trope because they involve that madness, that obsession, that loss of contact with reality. And also the narcotic is a theme in the Gothic specifically connected with that tradition of opium in literature. But really the gothic other that I think Ngaio is using here, the thing that's breaking through into the ordinary world is to do with drugs and to do with sexuality. So around the time that Ngaio is writing this book, there isn't actually a widespread drug problem in Britain. In fact, there was a survey done by the government of the number of heroin addicts in the country around this time, and it was less than a hundred. But cocaine, morphine and opium were all being used problematically, but by a set of people who were middle class or upper class and bohemian and connected to stage and bohemian sets in London.
And that drug use was connected to transgressive behaviours, so odd ideas about religion maybe, or ideas that were considered to be odd at the time about religion. And also connected to the rise of the kind of young woman who might be a bachelor. She might choose not to get married, she might choose to get an education, she might be interested in getting a job. also connected to this idea of alternative sexualities. So homosexuality in particular, which at the time was seen as very transgressive and problematic. So you can see how this makes the perfect gothic other to break through into that civilised orderly world of this society, this is how we do things. Young women get married. We set up homes. No one's homosexual. And there is this religious structure and there are traditions in life. But this bohemian culture was threatening that, and I suspect it was much more of a boogeyman than an actual large issue at the time. And there's also of course, the figure of Cara Quayne who is the murder victim, who is an unmarried young woman with her own resources. And I, I wonder if that also is a nod to the anxieties at the time about changing women's roles, about challenges to orthodox structures and around sexuality and gender roles.
Caroline: As you have heard, Death in Ecstasy does a great job of combining societal critique with her horrors. Marsh takes this much further in her New Zealand novels, which have a whole other dimension to their exploration of the gothic.
Alex: We've talked about how the Gothic is about a breakthrough of something dark and primaeval into the civilised orderly world. And how that can come in a variety of forms depending on the kind of concerns and anxieties of the day. The colonial gothic is a form of gothic in which the dark and primaeval other is connected to the native or the "savage". So it is a racist form of gothic that's rooted in empire. So the fear in that gothic is of the disorderly, unknown of native cultures, but also I think a fear of repercussions. A fear that's rooted in the knowledge that some injustice has occurred, and that there may be redress for that. So it's a very interesting form of gothic because it's not just about fear of the darkness breaking through. It also contains this fear that maybe that's justified.
Caroline: Marsh wrote four novels set in New Zealand: Vintage Murder, Colour Scheme, Died in the Wool and Photo Finish. They all have touches of the colonial gothic to them, Alex says, but it is Vintage Murder from 1937 where we see it most clearly.
Alex: One of the very first things that happens is that Alleyn presents Carolyn Dacres, the leading actress in the company with this present of a tiki, which is a little Maori carving, that's a fertility symbol, a carving of an embryo. A person who will go on to be the murder victim mocks the tiki and performs a kind of mocking, racist little dance and a kind of mumbo jumbo saying over it. And that is the start of the Gothic storyline, which runs underneath the rest of the plot. Because that transgression, that disrespect has happened, the tiki "takes revenge".
Caroline: In this book, Alleyn forms an interesting relationship with Dr Te Pokiha, a Maori doctor who has been educated in England before returning to his homeland to serve the people there. He's key to the way Marsh teases out the truth in Vintage Murder.
Alex: He's somebody who can see both sides of this story at once. And he can show both of them to the reader when he speaks. It's very clear in this book that she's very sympathetic to the Maori people and that she is very aware and she expresses this through specifically Dr Te Pokiha, the way that he talks about the impact that white colonisation had on his country. And he talks about the damage that's been done to the Maori people because they've been divorced from their culture and from their way of life. And that connects to the plot, that question of how do the white colonisers react to Maori tradition, Maori culture.
Caroline: So is it the tiki taking revenge on the coloniser's disrespect, or is it an old-fashioned case of one human murdering another? Marsh doesn't give us the easy answer.
Alex: And Dr Te Pokiha says that he believes this, but he also doesn't believe it, so he can believe it with a part of him that still belongs to his Maori culture, but he also doesn't believe it with the side of him that's been educated in England. But I think you can wonder whether Marsh believed it in the way that she allows that storyline to run under the whole novel without refuting it at any point. You can read the book both ways. You can say that both of those stories are true. And I think that what she's trying to do in the book is to write a story in which they are both true and that's fascinating.
Caroline: The tiki, this artefact, is central to this story, and that's something that Marsh was very keen on — locating her Gothic atmosphere in settings, objects and surroundings. This comes up in quite a few of her novels.
Alex: So in gothic fiction, the gothic house is one of the core tropes, and in gothic fiction, the house—the building—should be a character in its own right, and it should be an antagonist, something that is acting to contain and damage the person within it who is attempting to escape. And that's what we would call traditionally the female gothic.
Caroline: What is the female gothic, I hear you wonder. Alex?
Alex: So in the female gothic, traditionally a woman is trapped within a house, sometimes by, or quite often by, a menacing masculine figure. So if you think of a book like Rebecca, that's the classic example of the female gothic. And she's taken to Manderley and enclosed there with this man who seems increasingly to be untrustworthy and to have a dark past that he hasn't told her about. And she needs to escape that. And Ngaio Marsh uses, I think at least two buildings that would fall into that description. One of them is the Saracen Fortress in Spinsters in Jeopardy. That really is a classic gothic house. What could be more gothic than the Saracen fortress set on top of a network of caves where sinister rituals take place? Yes, please. I want to read that book.
Caroline: For the female gothic to function, you need a prisoner and a jailor. And in the case of this book, Spinsters in Jeopardy from 1953, it is Roderick Alleyn's wife, Agatha Troy, who is kept in the fortress by a very strange individual.
Alex: And you have this wonderful gothic man in a figure of Oberon, another fantastic name who is very kind of Father Garnette but he's probably a bit more menacing. So he is powerful. He's charismatic, he's magnetic. He's very sexual, but he is also rotten to the core. And so he is the force that has to be defeated in the story. And of course he is.
Caroline: Troy is once again trapped in a weird mansion in 1972's Tied Up in Tinsel, as it happens — seems to be a bad habit of hers. We read this book in the Shedunnit Book Club back in December 2022, and I have to admit that it wasn't my favourite, although now that Alex has told me that she loves it and explained its connection to the female gothic and Daphne du Maurier, I might have to give it another go.
Alex: What could be more gothic than a house stuffed by murderers on a howling moor at Christmas time with a prison in the valley next door. It really is wonderful. And again, we have Troy encountering the gothic man in a form of Hillary, who she describes his sexuality as feral, which is a very interesting choice of word. He's acquisitive. He collects things and he collects people, but he's also ruthless. I think he's quite a menacing figure. He does, of course, get away with it in the end. He doesn't suffer any repercussions for his terrible attitudes to life.
Caroline: This is not really what we expect from golden age detective fiction — the bad people generally get punished at the end, as order and justice prevail. But Ngaio Marsh is not as interested in that as she is in giving her gothic tropes free rein.
We see this most clearly, I think, in her 1956 novel Off With His Head. This one is an absolute feast of the weird and wacky.
Alex: This is the purest folk horror, and I love it because it's so over the top. It's almost as if she thought, what can I put in? I'll put in everything. So we have a sacrificial dolmen, we've got a mediaeval stroke Victorian castle. The pub's called The Green Man. There's Morris Dancing as a Pagan ritual. The murder victim believed in fairies and was descended from a witch, and we're only just getting started. I think that she is having such fun when she wrote this book.
She uses this idea of transgression. You'll get this quite a lot in horror fiction and horror films. Someone will do something transgressive like dig up the Old Graveyard, for example, or disrespect something that has supernatural powers. And in this novel, the transgression is to do with the inclusion of women in the Morris dancing. The Gothic storyline that runs beneath the plot is that the dolman at the centre of this Morris dancing ritual that takes place at the winter Solstice wants revenge for this transgression. And they have a taste for blood because one of the dancers has cut off the head of a goose in an act of protest and left the goose on top of the stone. And that thereafter it wants more blood. So it takes the head of the murder victim.
Caroline: Yes, you heard that right — this is a novel about Morris dancing and the decapitation of a goose. It's really good. In fact, if you're going to read anything that we talk about today, Alex recommends that you make it Off With His Head.
Alex: It is the purest slice of British Gothic that you could possibly have. It's tremendously enjoyable. It's very clever in its plot. And it's also set set in winter. So as we're going into winter, I always like to read something gothic that's got that kind of cold, snowy, countryside atmosphere.
Caroline: So there you have it: if you want a mystery that will give you a chill down your spine and tie up your brain in convoluted knots, look no further than the work of Ngaio Marsh. She really is the queen of gothic crime.
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This episode of Shedunnit was written, produced and hosted by me, Caroline Crampton.
Many thanks to my guest, Alex Clark. Her first novel, Dovecombe, will be published in early 2027. It’s a twisted Gothic mystery set in a remote English manor house, and it’s available for pre-order now wherever you get your books. There's more information at her website, alexclarkauthor.com.
You can find links to everything that we mentioned in the episode description and at shedunnitshow.com/thequeenofgothiccrime. I also publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.
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Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece and production assistance came from Leandra Griffith.
Thanks for listening.