The new series of Ngaio Marsh editions concludes with a new edition of her autobiography. What sort of person was Ngaio Marsh, whose detective novels made her name known throughout the world? With all the insight and sense of style her readers have come to expect of her, her autobiography reveals the influences and environment that have shaped her personality. Widely acclaimed when first published in 1965, Black Beech and Honeydew is a sensitive account of Ngaio Marsh's childhood and adolescence in Christchurch and the establishment of her theatre and writing careers both there and in the UK. It captures all the joys, fears and hopes of a spirited young woman growing up and transmits an artist's gradual awareness of the special flavour of life in New Zealand and the individual character of its landscape. Fully revised and updated in 1981, this new edition is reissued 21 years later as a commemoration of Ngaio Marsh's life and work. It is a sanguine, poised, unpretentious, thoughtful and often moving record of a full life, and -- despite its unavailability for nearly 20 years -- has been acclaimed as her most distinguished work. No one who had read and enjoyed any of Ngaio Marsh's 32 novels can afford to overlook this gifted and charming autobiography.

Black Beech and Honeydew

Biographies & Memoirs

NGAIO MARSH

Arts & Literature

Harper Collins Pod

Ngaio Marsh's most popular novel begins when a young New Zealander's first contact with the English gentry is the body of Lord Wutherford -- with a meat skewer through the eye...The Lampreys had plenty of charm -- but no cash. They all knew they were peculiar -- and rather gloried in it. The double and triple charades, for instance, with which they would entertain their guests -- like rich but awful Uncle Gabriel, who was always such a bore. The Lampreys thought if they jollied him up he would bail them out -- yet again. Instead, Uncle Gabriel met a violent end. And Chief Inspector Alleyn had to work our which of them killed him...

A Surfeit of Lampreys

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

Death and the dancing footman

A winter weekend ends in snowbound disaster in a novel which remains a favourite among Marsh readers. It began as an entertainment: eight people, many of them enemies, gathered for a winter weekend by a host with a love for theatre. They would be the characters in a drama that he would devise. It ended in snowbound disaster. Everyone had an alibi -- and most a motive as well. But Chief Detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn, when he finally arrived, knew it all hung on Thomas, the dancing footman!

Death and the Dancing Footman

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Mystery

Colour Scheme

Often regarded as her most interesting book and set on New Zealand's North Island, Ngaio Marsh herself considered this to be her best-written novel. It was a horrible death -- Maurice Questing was lured into a pool of boiling mud and left there to die. Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn, far from home on a wartime quest for German agents, knew that any number of people could have killed him: the English exiles he'd hated, the New Zealanders he'd despised or the Maoris he'd insulted. Even the spies he'd thwarted -- if he wasn't a spy himself!

Ngaio Marsh returns to her New Zealand roots to transplant the classic country house murder mystery to an upland sheep station on South Island -- and produces one of her most exotic and intriguing novels. One summer evening in 1942 Flossie Rubrick, MP, one of the most formidable women in New Zealand, goes to her husband's wool shed to rehearse a patriotic speech -- and disappears. Three weeks later she turns up at an auction -- packed inside one of her own bales of wool and very, very dead!

Died in the Wool

A country house murder, artistic insight and the post-war reunion of Alleyn and Troy combine in Ngaio Marsh's wittiest and most readable novel. Agatha Troy, world famous portrait painter, is inveigled into accepting a commission to paint the 70-year-old Sir Henry Ancred, Bart., the Grand Old Man of the stage. But just as she has completed her portrait, the old actor dies. The dramatic circumstances of his death are such that Scotland Yard is called in -- in the person of Troy's long-absent husband, Chief Detective-Inspector Roderick Alleyn!

Final Curtain

The Nursing Home Murder

Ngaio Marsh's bestselling and ingenious third novel remains one of the most popular pieces of crime fiction of all time. Sir John Phillips, the Harley Street surgeon, and his beautiful nurse Jane Harden are almost too nervous to operate. The emergency case on the table before them is the Home Secretary -- and they both have very good, personal reasons to wish him dead. Within hours he does die, although the operation itself was a complete success, and Chief Detective Inspector Alleyn must find out why!

One of Ngaio Marsh's most famous murder mysteries, which introduces Inspector Alleyn to his future wife, the irrepressible Agatha Troy. It started as a student exercise, the knife under the drape, the model's pose chalked in place. But before Agatha Troy, artist and instructor, returns to the class, the pose has been re-enacted in earnest: the model is dead, fixed for ever in one of the most dramatic poses Troy has ever seen. It's a difficult case for Chief Detective Inspector Alleyn. How can he believe that the woman he loves is a murderess? And yet no one can be above suspicion!

Artists in Crime

A body in the back of a taxi begins an elegantly constructed mystery, perhaps the finest of Marsh's 1930s novels. The season had begun. Debutantes and chaperones were planning their luncheons, teas, dinners, balls. And the blackmailer was planning his strategies, stalking his next victim. But Chief Detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn knew that something was up. He had already planted his friend Lord Robert Gospell at the scene. But someone else got there first...

Death in a White Tie

MARSH, NGAIO

A dramatic novel, based on a wonderful historical concept: the power of evil, given to one man. For thirty pieces of silver, Judas committed the most famous betrayal in history. Thirty coins which gave their possessor such a power for evil that it could only be resisted by the greatest saint, Peter. Twenty-five of the pieces have been safely gathered and kept safe in the sacred tomb of St Peter in the Vatican. But what became of the remaining five coins? Paul, a brilliant criminal psychologist, has been responsible for an accused murderer being released. Meeting the man later, he fears the consequences of his mistake, but is distracted by an unusually attractive visitor. And the first coin appears. Paul's path to evil, the choices and the temptations on the way are brilliantly portrayed. The Church, led by the formidable Cardinal Benelli, knows of the evil performed by previous holders of the coins, such as Diocletion, but none was as terrifying as the conjunction of the hapless Paul and, through him, the rise, once more, of the Magus. Powerful, fascinating, full of historical detail, of secret histories of the Vatican, of occult practices and philosophy, The Coins of Judas is a spellbinding new novel.

The Coins of Judas

Scott McBain

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