This is another novel by Ngaio Marsh (1895-1982). And I've done my out-of-order thing again... This, the fifth book in the Roderick Alleyn series, was published in 1937, and is the first that she set in her native New Zealand. Colour Scheme, on the other hand, which I read in February, came out in 1943, was Inspector Alleyn's 12th outing, and was the second (of four) where the action is located in New Zealand.

I listened to the audio-version, and -- as I found last time -- the narrator's English accents were great, but the Kiwi ones not so much... Antipodean accents are VERY hard to mimic, and more people think they can do them than actually manage to pull them off.

It works well as an audio-book, as much of the plot moves along by way of conversation. But there are a ton of characters. Arm yourself with a list of dramatis personae from somewhere.

As I noted last time, Marsh had multiple identities as well as multiple talents. Bruce Harding tells us that her father was a Londoner, and her mother a second-generation Kiwi, while her uncle was a lay missionary and Maori speaker (he it was who chose her second name, Ngaio, which was the one she preferred over Edith, her first). She spent large chunks of time in the UK, and generally represented a "fluid, hybrid status". Many of her characters embody "the dilemma of the sensitive New Zealander attracted to metropolitan style but belonging to New Zealand..., young people caught in the irreconcilable pull between local belonging and Northern Hemisphere sophistication and aesthetic-intellectual variety".

Marsh grew up with theatre, and became involved as a young woman with local dramatic productions. Visits of the Allan Wilkie Theatre Company from 1916 onwards introduced her to professional Shakespearean productions, and Wilkie offered her a place with the company for its NZ tour of autumn 1920. This is the experience she recalls in Vintage Murder, which features an English theatre company on tour in New Zealand. Certainly, her character studies of the various players are stuffed with the kind of funny and poignant details that could only have come from first-hand familiarity.

As we're still in the 1930s, our theatre company has travelled out on the boat, and then takes the train down through the North Island. A fellow-passenger on both is our Chief Inspector Alleyn. He's not as incog as he was in Colour Scheme, but he is not entirely out in the open either. He's supposed to be on holiday, getting some R&R, but having become acquainted with the players on the long journey (one of them he knows anyway from a previous case), he finds himself caught up in the investigation when the inevitable murder takes place.


Our first train trip in the North Island, 1992

The "vintage" in the title is not a prescient reference to the book's status, but rather describes the jereboam of champagne which Alfred Meyer, proprietor and managing director of the theatre company, intends to be a birthday surprise for Carolyn Dacres, the troupe's leading lady and Meyer's wife. The plan is for the ginormous bottle to come floating gently down on pulleys, to the awe of the assembled guests. What actually happens is that the bottle comes whizzing down unchecked, and smashes the hapless Meyer's head to pulp.

Alleyn is invited to participate in the investigation, and there's much pussyfooting around as he tries not to upstage or upset his local counterparts. But he's a nice chap, and seems to keep on the right side of everyone. Complicating the scenario are a theft, a previous attempt on Meyer's life, a persistent suitor, and a cover-up effort. But, of course, Alleyn figures it out.

A contemporary review quoted here says that Marsh has written "his [sic] most subtle and amusing tale so far", and I certainly enjoyed following the twists and turns of the attempt to establish alibis, and to isolate the person could have contrived to do the deed (by removing the counterweight on the pulley) without being noticed by any of the copious cast of characters that were floating around the theatre at the time. I have no problem with Marsh's step-by-step approach, especially as the characters are quirky and entertaining. The modern reviews that I read, however, are quite negative. They don't like the long interviews...

Pluses:

-- The theatre company background. They're all hammy, of course. But the little details are well observed, and the characters often poignant.

-- The opening train scene! Not only is it a TRAIN, but it travels via the Raurimu Spiral, the really awesome bit of railway engineering that wowed us back in 1992.


Twisting backwards and forwards through the bush...





-- The descriptions of New Zealand nature. These are really well done. We experience the bush, and the mountains, and all Aotearoa's aloof and indefinable grandeur, through the eyes of newcomer Alleyn, who finds his host country "very remote and strange", but warms to it. "And from the trees came the voice of a solitary bird, a slow cadence, deeper than any they had ever heard, ringing, remote and cool, above the sound of water" -- you have to admit that's a pretty neat description of the bellbird...


Ngauruhoe gets a mention...


But that whole area is sublime



-- Also interesting are the perceptive comments about how New Zealanders often felt towards incoming Poms. Alleyn finds them proud of their country, and apt to be defensive, allergic to anything that smacks of the patronizing (and heaven knows they've had to deal with plenty of that over the years). But, as he attests, they're friendly and warm once they know you're on their side. Their craving for approval seems a little needy -- after Alfred Meyer's introductory speech, for example, "The reporters wrote busily the outlines for an article which would presently appear under the headline: 'Praise for New Zealand: An Enthusiastic Visitor'" -- but this is not a uniquely NZ trait; it's a characteristic of any "smaller" country that has too often been forced to live in the shadow of the bigger folks.

Minuses:

-- The flip-side of this last point... D.M. Devereux puts it like this: "Marsh, although a colonial, did little to give New Zealanders a voice beyond that of the good natured people with their appalling dialect, defensiveness and embarrassing pretensions to Englishness." Harding quotes Professor Ian Gordon, who writes of "the idea that there is something to be ashamed of in speaking New Zealand English which still haunts us. We see ourselves as the minor character in one of Ngaio Marsh's own whodunnits who speaks in a way that 'betrays his antipodean origin'. He is always good for a laugh." Harding continues: "From the moment when Alleyn meets the plain and deferential New Zealand detectives... his position as one of authority is unmistakable. This becomes frankly unbearably embarrassing to the reader... [Detective-Inspector Packer's gushing admiration] is admittedly dreadful, and it creates a cruel caricature of a coarse and naively oafish colonial. With phrases like these, Marsh's respect for her own people is thrown sharply into question." He later quotes Marsh, who drips with condescension as she explains why her books contain so many English characters: "I'm afraid I do think by and large that the New Zealand dialogue is very monotonous and I do think that the average New Zealander has a very short vocabulary... New Zealanders all speak very much like each other. They haven't got many individual idiosyncrasies in expressing themselves." Ooooh... Cutting... Worthy of the cattiest of thespians. Elsewhere, she pronounces: "I wouldn't say that a very lively or vivid imagination is a national characteristic."



-- Also ambivalent are the references to Maori. Again this is a two-sided element. On the one hand, the Maori element somehow feels a bit off. We are at first given a deferential picture of Rangi Te Pokiha, a highly cultivated Maori doctor, but his show of violence after a character accuses him of lying is an unhelpful piece of stereotyping, which is only compounded when Alleyn muses about "the odd twenty per cent of pure savage" beneath the doctor's urbane exterior. Harding says it was this passage that enraged writer and critic Bill Pearson, who tore into stories that purport to show "that all Maoris, no matter how educated, are incomprehensible savages at heart". On the other hand, I think Marsh is quite enlightened by the standards of her time. As S. Rowland acknowledges, "Golden age writers lived and wrote in a racist society. Characters in works by all four writers [the 'queens of crime', namely Christie, Allingham, Sayers, and Marsh] make unchallenged racist comments, and only Marsh emphatically addresses racism as a stain on English character." Rowland points out that Marsh always respects Maori culture "as different, never to be completely comprehended by the whites, and NOT in an evolutionary relation to Western modernity". In Vintage Murder, Alleyn develops a friendship with Te Pokiha, who paints a perceptive and sympathetic picture of the difficulties his people are suffering, and laments that Maori "have become a side-show in the tourist bureau -- our dances -- our art -- everything". Marsh, using Alleyn as a mouthpiece, criticizes the flippant and disrespectful way in which some of the actors react to the tiki that the detective has gifted to Carolyn. Harding also quotes the author as stating, on an American tour, "that I have no Maori blood but would be proud of it if I did". So... jury out on that one, just as it was on the same issue in Colour Scheme.

I noted in that post on Colour Scheme that Marsh, though appreciated in New Zealand for her contributions to the theatre, had not received much acclaim as a writer. Devereux comments that -- despite her formidable popularity in the UK and the United States (biographer Margaret Lewis claims that Americans preferred her to Agatha Christie) -- she was regarded, in her country of birth, as "an embarrassment to New Zealand Literature". Writing in 2012, he assesses that little has changed since: "In a country invested in promoting its literary past and present, Ngaio Marsh remains an unfamiliar name to most New Zealanders." Is this because of the minuses I've mentioned? Or is it just a snobbish disdain for detective fiction that's in play here?

I think she's worth pursuing a bit further. There are two more that are set in New Zealand (dated 1945 and 1980 -- yes, such a long career...). But I think I should try to follow the order a bit more conscientiously, rather than home in on these.

I also feel I should be checking out some more New Zealand literature, having perused a 50 best books list, and realized that I've read only four of them...