Ngaio Marsh – Harry Heuser

30th June 20261st July 2026

When in Rome (1970): With Ngaio Marsh at the Villa Giulia

I had never been to Rome, that teeming aggregation of antiquities to which all roads ostensibly, and, as it appears, inevitably lead. Eventually, that is. Years of German high school Latin, drummed into me at a school not far from the Roman outpost of Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium (Cologne), did little to raise my curiosity sufficiently to make me hit one of them. Those roads, I mean, or, for that matter, any books on the destination that proved final for Daisy Miller, who caught Roman Fever traipsing around the ruins that Mr. Stone never got to see, having perished in transit so that his missus, Mrs. Stone, might experience, at his expense, the Roman Holiday of a Roman Spring.

As eternal as the standard admission lines to its main attractions, the Italian capital lingered on the bottom of what, by now, has turned into a bucket list of sights yet to see, a catalogue of places to die for that reminds me of nothing more forcefully than my ever-dwindling supply of vitality. The adage that Rome wasn’t built in a day does no longer make my inclination to take things slow seem like a virtue, much less an option.

The frescoed semicircular loggia of Villa Giulia

Although I was not exactly fit as a fiddle while Rome burned in the sweltering spring of 2026—an unseasonable reminder that our insistence of ticking off items on our must-see lists might well contribute to our species kicking the bucket before long—I nonetheless returned with the nagging question why it had taken me so long to visit. So long, apparently, that everyone else decided to make the move at the same time and take over the place like a horde of goths—the latter-day sad sacks of Rome—spilling into the Forum.

It was a visit to Cinecittà—the fabled Hollywood on the Tiber—that brought back memories of many a vicarious visit to Rome, none more enchanting than William Wyler’s Ein Herz und eine Krone (“A heart and a crown”), under which title I first experienced Roman Holiday (1953) dubbed in German. Partly shot, and spectacularly so, on location, the romantic comedy was filmed at Cinecittà, as was Wyler’s 1959 epic Ben-Hur and its 2016 remake, along with countless Italian pictures, from the Telefoni Bianchi comedy romances of the Mussolini era to the fantasies of Frederico Fellini, who referred to Rome’s film studios as an “ideal place” that “replaced the world” for him.

At the Bocca della Verità — The Bocca della Verità, Rome, as approached via Roman Holiday

Approaching the culture and history of Rome via the dream factory of Cinecittà—on a personal tour that, incidentally, followed news then breaking of Wyler’s daughter, philanthropist and arts patron Judith Sheldon, being found dead in her jeep, alongside her husband—comports with and is characteristic of the obliquity with which I am wont to sidle up to any subject. My idiosyncratically queer way or waywardness of sliding aslant on a scale of relative irrelevancies are expressive of my struggle to get the facts straight and my unwillingness to surrender to apodictic tyranny by accepting them as imperative, impartial and incontrovertible.

The tumble-down classicality of Rome engenders a Felliniesque retreat from factuality. The allure of ruins, at least to minds romantically inclined, lies in their state of incompletion, the presence of their partial absence. Their fragmentation and decay enable us to imagine the past, of which they are imperfectly imaged representations, and, through the peculiar interplay of art and nature, appreciate the present as evolving, not fixed. Their artifactuality thus exceeds the mere factual. No systems of classification are equal to their mystery. Would ancient civilizations have such a fascination for us if we had them all figured out?

The question is rhetorical, and it leads me in a roundabout way to When in Rome (1970), a murder mystery by Ngaio Marsh, without whose mention of it I would not have visited the Villa Giulia. The Villa houses the National Etruscan Museum, the world’s foremost collection of Etruscan art, of which the tomb effigy of Sarcofago degli Sposi—the Sarcophagus of the Spouses—is the most celebrated. It is at its feet that Marsh’s mystery opens:

Continue reading “When in Rome (1970): With Ngaio Marsh at the Villa Giulia”

26th June 20221st August 2022

“Bloody strange but not, I have decided, queer”: Ngaio Marsh’s Killer Dolphin (1966), the Theater, and the Sexual Offences Act 1967

“Theater Is Not for Fags,” the sign reads. It was brandished, among other such boards, in a rather unconvincing crowd scene in “The Other Vibrator,” the possibly well-intentioned but insipid eleventh episode of Grace and Frankie’s third season, with which I eventually caught up only a few days ago. The morning after, I finished reading Ngaio Marsh’s Killer Dolphin (1966). And the way that my wayward mind works, I put it down with that slogan in mind.

Retitled Death at the Dolphin, Marsh’s mystery novel was published in Britain in 1967, half a century before the Grace and Frankie episode first aired. That means it came before the public just as the Sexual Offences Act 1967 decriminalized consensual – and private – homosexual acts among adult males in England and Wales. This being Gay Pride month, I am perhaps especially alert to anxieties surrounding gender and queer identity. At any rate, I detected an unease – or a playful response to public misgivings, actual or perceived –about homosexuality in Marsh’s narrative, which features a single gay character, and a minor one at that, while most of the other players – actors and creatives all – are carefully coupled in more or less, and mostly less, cosy heterosexual bonds.

Could it be, I wondered, that Marsh, herself a theater director, was sharing the sentiment that public playhouses – in swinging London, to boot – are not a platform for gay men?

9th September 202122nd May 2026

Marsh, Not Mellow: A Clutch of Constables (1968) and a Pang of Conscience

“We are not a starry-eyed lot.”

Mystery and detective fiction has been experiencing a decided revival since the mid 2010s, certainly in Britain. This is in part owing to—and evidenced by— the re-release of so-called golden-age whodunits by the British Library. What the public’s readiness to soak up all that blood of yesteryear might tell us about the mores of the present day I shall leave to sociologists to unravel.

I, for one, welcomed that reopening of landmark trials and half-forgotten cases, not only as a chance at armchair detection—especially during the pandemic, with time standing eerily still—but as an opportunity to reflect on my murderous past by returning to those crime scenes in middle age, knowing full well and being quite relieved that, by catching up, I could never, and would never have to, go home again to what did not feel homely to begin with: the mysteries and misery of adolescence.

That said, picking up the clues and piecing together the puzzle we are to ourselves, I feel a queer consistency—or consistent queerness at the racing, bleeding or prematurely failing heart of it all.

My transition from children’s literature to ostensibly grown-up fiction did not happen via the young adult section of a lending library. Fictions about growing up rarely spoke to me, as, back then, they were largely silent about desires that, while no longer criminalized, were deemed unfit for titles on general display.

Murder mysteries, in their indiscriminate pronouncements of death sentences, were reassuring in that respect. Anyone could be a suspect or victim, and eventually the act of victimization would be disclosed. Murder, at least, will out. The most formulaic mysteries were the most agreeable to me. I did not care for social realism that did not match my felt reality. Agatha Christie whodunits, in particular, I appreciated for the perfunctory relentlessness of their nursery rhyme catechism in counting down and categorical settling of accounts.

Returning now to detective fiction via some of Christie’s notable but lesser-known contemporary competitors, I look for and find a renewed relevance. Ngaio Marsh’s Clutch of Constables (1968), a copy of which I spotted in a local charity shop, makes considerable efforts to encourage such a reassessment.

To begin with, those Constables referred to in the title are not officers of the law: they are patches of the outdoors featured in landscape paintings by the artist of the same name. I would not have been alive to Marsh’s wordplay that all those years ago, when I was reading A Clutch of Constables in a German translation, removed from the culture in which they were produced and of which they speak.

To be sure, the German title of Marsh’s mystery, Mord auf dem Fluss (Murder on the River) is so generic as to leave neither a hint of its origins nor a trace in my memory; I had to consult an old diary to discover that I had indeed read it some thirty-five years earlier.

Significantly, the Constables in question are not the real thing—and, as I know now, being a reader and writer of art’s histories, even the real thing was not a true picture of parts of Britain but a commentary on changing times. The same can be said about A Clutch of Constables.

The action of Marsh’s novel takes place aboard the “pleasure-craft Zodiac” as it leisurely cruises on a meandering river. “For Five Days you Step out of Time,” the operators promise in their advertising—but there is no sidestepping the sign of the times. And however picturesque the scenery, the river has not escaped pollution, with “detergent foam” muddying the waters and our image of an England steeped in history and yet somehow untouched by it. Want your murders “cozy”? No soap, says Marsh.

By the time Clutch of Constables was published, Marsh had been in the guessing game for decades, and the whodunit was well past its prime. Her aim, clearly, was to make her later work resonate with a new generation of mystery readers while remaining within the established boundaries of the genre.

What caught my attention was the self-consciousness with which Marsh’s mystery, for all its adroit plotting, reflected on its grappling with social relevance. Marsh’s portrayal of two American, er, tourists, at once conservative and conniving, both reflects and reinforces changing attitudes towards the United States during the Vietnam War.

One of the characters, the surgeon Doctor Natouche—black and British—is the subject of harassment, stereotyping and suspicion. And while readers are not encouraged altogether to rule out his guilt, those who judge him based on the color of his skin—the visiting Americans among them—are proven wrong both morally and intellectually.

Marsh’s narrative also enables the spouse of her series detective, Inspector Alleyn, to assume center stage. Agatha “Troy” Alleyn is an exhibiting artist and an astute observer reporting from the scene of the crime. Even though, eventually, she is unceremoniously dismissed so her husband can take over and solve the crime, that position is justified by Marsh.

A reference to a popular franchise character serves as a reminder that, in the late 1960s, the latest developments in crime fiction were far from advanced: “In the Force our wives are not called upon to serve in female James-Bondage and I imagine most of you would agree that any notion of their involvement in our work would be outlandish, ludicrous and extremely unpalatable.”

In A Clutch of Constables, Marsh is making a plea for whodunits as a force for good, capable of making a difference by exposing prejudices rooted in the widely held but erroneous notion of a homogenous British society. Take this passage, for instance, in which Inspector Alleyn—who is also an educator in and of the police force—reflects on the task of detection:

The moral is: that it takes all sorts to make a thoroughly bad lot and it sometimes takes a conscientious police officer quite a long time to realise this simple fact of unsavoury life. You can’t type criminals.

Detective fiction need not be removed from the lives and causes that matter, Marsh seems to say, anticipating the debates of the present day. Taking the policing genre to task, A Clutch of Constables releases it from the grasp of those clinging to the false memory of a none-too-golden past. “We are not a starry-eyed lot,” Alleyn insists:

But at the risk of getting right off the track—a most undesirable proceeding—I would like to say this. You won’t be any the worse at your job if you can keep your humanity. If you lose it altogether you’ll be, in my opinion, better out of the Force because with it you’ll have lost your sense of values and that’s a dire thing to befall any policeman.

That “dire thing” may also “befall” the writer of cleverly crafted whodunits. To avoid such failings, Marsh not only communicates her values but, in those asides, advises her peers to not to let go of their fellow feeling at the profitable drop of another clutch of lifeless bodies.