The Ngaio Marsh House, Cashmere, Christchurch, New Zealand

The Ngaio Marsh House has a web site, which states that the house suffered scarcely any damage during the earthquakes: the message is unequivocal: it is open for business. Unfortunately though, it wasn't open to us, and under the present state of administration, judging from our experience it's doubtful that it's open for business for many people at all.

The first thing we did on arriving at our hotel in Christchurch was to set about arranging a tour of the house: it's only open by private booking and states that a visit on the same day is virtually impossible, but this was early on a Monday and we had the following day, or at the latest the Wednesday morning, in which to visit the house.

We were in for a few shocks though. My partner Penny began organizing a visit, but after two attempts on the phone in our hotel room she couldn't get through, so went to reception to find out what she was doing wrong.

Shock number one was that the advertised phone number of the Ngaio Marsh House seems to be incorrect, so the receptionist provided Penny with the right number.

Back at the hotel room came shock number two: the number merely put her though to the house, where the caller has to leave a message. Penny stated our interest in viewing the house, and asked to be called back the same, or the following, evening. No one called: clearly, the answering machine is in the Ngaio Marsh House, which is empty, and the curator or similar presumably only visits on certain days – well, either that or the person simply doesn't bother replying to all enquiries.

Disappointment is obviously one of our feelings: when you travel to the furthest point of the world from yours, with one of your intentions being to visit a place which you then find yourself unable to visit due to apparent indifference or incompetence or whatever, then disappointment is inevitable.

But our disgust at the shoddy administration is much stronger: the phone number is apparently incorrect, but we received no reply to our phone message left at the right number (which Penny says revealed a frosty voice spoken from the Ngaio Marsh House). This caused us to wonder about the problems other people in a similar situation to ours must have had.

The Ngaio Marsh House web site gives its dialling code from foreign countries along with its (apparently incorrect) number: are we seriously expected to believe that someone at the house (when and if they get round to responding up the phone message) will make an international phone call to arrange a visit? I find it impossible to believe so, as it seems they can't even trouble themselves to make a local call to a hotel less than ten miles from the house itself.

But then, to repeat, the Ngaio Marsh House has its own web site, so in spirit the organization seems to belong to this century – so why, instead of all the phone call nonsense, doesn't it leave an email address? That's the way things have been done since the later years of the last century.

We had no problems visiting three other authors' houses: The Janet Frame House in Oamaru is open every day from November to April from 14:00 to 16:00; the Katherine Mansfield Birthplace in Wellington is open every day apart from Monday from 10:00 to 16:00; and the day we arrived in Takapuna from Hamilton, we arranged to visit the Frank Sargeson House the following day at 10:00 with the extremely obliging Vanessa from Takapuna Library.

Let the message be clear: The Ngaio Marsh House has serious problems when it comes to anyone arranging a visit, although a simple email address (as long as it is read on a regular daily basis) is all that is needed to correct things, all that is needed to avoid angering potential visitors. Such as us.

Ngaio Marsh: Black Beech and Honeydew: An Autobiography (1965)

 

Vy Elsom's sketch of Ngaio Marsh (1895-1982) on the back cover of the dust jacket

 

This of course is not the revised 1981 edition of the autobiography but the first edition. Written in a fastidious and urbane style, this is in some ways a part-autobiography not in that it misses years out – indeed it takes us from Marsh's early childhood (not quite, but almost, in a conventional linear manner) virtually to the time of writing – but in that it almost misses Marsh's very public profession out. Overwhelmingly, the author concentrates on her less known work in the beginning as an actor, then later as a theatre director; but, a little like her (rather snobbish, it must be said) friends who wouldn't demean themselves by bringing up the subject, Marsh is almost silent about her popular crime novels (which amount to 32). In fact, the penultimate paragraph ends in a rare exclamation mark – 'How right I was!' – in summing up her decision to pursue her passion and direct ten Shakespeare plays rather than considerably increase her bank account funds by writing ten more novels.

 

Marsh also writes about her journeys by boat to England (very much her second home) and of her friends. We have to go to Joanne Drayton's Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime to discover the real name of the unstable Russian 'Sacha', who proposed to her and later killed himself (although not because of the rejection): he was Peter Tokareff. Much more important to Marsh's autobiography are the 'Lampreys', a family she spent some time with in England, and whose real name is Rhodes: the novel A Surfeit of Lampreys (a reference to the cause of Henry I's death) depicts a noted fictionalization of the Rhodes family.

 

Marsh does reveal that she took the Scottish name Roderick and the surname of the 17th century founder of Dulwich College – Edward Alleyne – to create the handsome, Eton-educated dectective that Marsh wanted to see as a departure from slightly eccentric detectives of other writers, who comforted their readership by churning out familiar verbal tics.

 

Marsh also reveals her childhood fear of poison here, and says she only uses it in her books 'on rare occasions', but although I'm only familiar with four of her novels, two of them do strongly feature poison as a murder weapon: The Nursing Home Murder (1935) and Death at the Bar (1940). I haven't yet encountered the acting profession in her work, although I'm aware that she's used it as a background to several novels.

 

In a word, Marsh's book inevitably (and a little disappointingly for many readers, it seems) tells the reader what she wants to tell them, although a broader picture can be seen from Drayton's biography, which – like Claire Tomalin's biography of Katherine Mansfield – I find slightly irritating because it refers to its subject throughout by her first name.

 

Ngaio Marsh's home in Cashmere, Christchurch, where (with the exception of visits to England) she lived for 77 years, fortunately survived earthquake damage and remains open to the public.