Queens of Crime 2: Vintage Murder by Ngaio Marsh

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Secret Life of Books 1h 5m 2 speakers 7 chapters transcribed

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What is the significance of the Detection Club in detective fiction?

Sophie Gee 0:02

A door at the far end opened, as all doors in detective novels open, slowly. In came Miss Dorothy Sayers in her academic robes, lit by a single taper. She mounted the rostrum. Judge my alarm when I saw that among the folds of her gown, she secreted a large automatic revolver. In came the others in a solemn procession bearing lighted tapers and lethal instruments. and last of all, John Rode with a grinning skull on a cushion. And there, in the middle of them, looking apprehensive as well he might, was poor Mr Bentley. With huge solemnity, Sayers administered the Detection Club oath to Bentley, who promised, under pain of every horror that every concocter of crime fiction has ever invented... to obey the laws of detective fiction.

Sophie Gee 0:52

He took the oath and then, close to my ear and without the slightest hint of warning, in a private drawing room at Grosvenor House at about 11pm on a summer evening, Miss Dorothy Sayers loosed off her six-shooter.

Jonty Claypole 1:05

That is Nioh Marsh's account of attending a detection club meeting in 1937 when the presidency was being passed to Bentley. And we're using it as a passing of the slob relay stick from Dorothea L. Sayers, who we talked about last week, and we opened that episode up. with the oaths she had written for members who wanted to join the detection club. And here we've got Nyomarsh's own eyewitness account of one of those ceremonies. And the fact that Nyomarsh wrote that in 1937, which is the same year that she published the book we're talking about today, Vintage Murder, is really apt. And in it, you have not only this sense of an outsider entering and being allowed to observe a closed community, but also the fact that Naomi Marsh was from New Zealand, she's an outsider to England, and that she is there kind of watching as well.

Jonty Claypole 2:06

She's still got her outsider status. She's from the outside looking in. So it felt like a really... pertinent way of getting into this week's episode.

Sophie Gee 2:17

Oh, wow, Jonty, it's absolutely perfect. And just to remind listeners, the Detection Club was, of course, the gathering of detective fiction writers who basically talked about their craft and how they were going to kind of prosecute their next detection stories.

Jonty Claypole 2:31

Right, let's get this started.

2:33

Jonty Claypole 2:34

This is The Secret Life of Books. I am Jonty Claypole. I'm a policeman in New Zealand, suddenly finding myself working with one of the most famous detectives from Scotland Yard, Roderick Allen, deeply aware of my inferiority as a crime investigator, feeling the cultural cringe.

Sophie Gee 2:57

I'm Sophie Gee, a colonial outsider raised in the Antipodes in Oceania, hoping to make it back to London where I can become part of the continental milieu of great detective writers with a keen interest in the theatre and a great love of shopkeeping. This week, Vintage Murder by Naio Marsh.

Jonty Claypole 3:20

The method of death in a Nioh Marsh novel tends to linger in the memory. So wrote the great crime writer of the second half of the 20th century, P.D. James. And Marsh's vintage murder from 1937 is no exception to James's observation. The victim is killed by a vast bottle of champagne. known as a jeroboam, falling from a great height. And boy, oh boy, does it make a mess. So this is the second episode in our Queens of Crime series, third if you count last year's deep dive into Agatha Christie. The four Queens of Crime, Christie, Dorothy Alsares, Niall Marsh and Marjorie Allingham, reigned supreme in the golden age of detective fiction from the 1920s to the 1950s. But Nyomarsh was very much the outlier.

Jonty Claypole 4:13

She was the wild, agnostic colonial girl in a gang of proud Brits. Vintage Murder, published in 1937, was the fifth novel out of 33 to feature Marsh's detective hero, Roderick Allen, who made his debut only three years before in A Man Laid Dead. Vintage Murder is considered one of Marcia's very best books, and in it she overcame her cultural cringe and brought... And we're going to have to define at some point cultural cringe, Sophie, because it's probably more apparent to us what that phrase is. She overcame her cultural cringe and brought Roderick Allen on holiday to her homeland, New Zealand, only to find, as Hercule Poirot so often discovered, that there is no rest for the unwicked.