Tuesday Night Blogs: Ngaio Marsh and the Scottish Play

In Ngaio Marsh - Her Life in Crime Joanne Drayton wrote that Marsh had kept her life in compartments; theatre director, writer, life in New Zealand, life in Britain and Europe, private life with different people often in different countries. Occasionally these overlapped through dedication of books to people who might belong to another part of her life not the British literary scene, through the appearance of certain characters based on real ones, such as the egregious Lampreys but most often through Shakespeare whose plays are referred to or quoted in numerous novels while a number was produced by her in New Zealand, especially for the Canterbury College Drama Society.

Of the various plays it is Hamlet and Macbeth, particularly the latter, that are mentioned most often. The Scottish Play is central in two novels and is important in several for various reasons.

Marsh produced Macbeth at least twice, the first time immediately after the war at the CUCDS, advertising for demobbed soldiers to play various parts. The production was marred by the inadequate props, toy swords and Macbeth's papier mâché head on a stick in the last scene. This was corrected for the subsequent hugely successful tour but memories of the humiliating notices may well have been with Marsh when she was writing Light Thickens, her last novel and one of her best ones, which is about the perfect production of the play.

The same year, 1946, she wrote a book about what she considered to be the right way to tackle plays, particularly Shakespeare, A Play Toward: A Note On Play Production. The ideas she expressed in it, ones that crop up in her novels that are about theatrical productions, were not precisely new but, it seems, unknown among New Zealand critics.

Dramatic dialogue was not a series of speeches delivered by individual actors but a series of spoken movements, each with its own form and climax, carried out be a group of players.

In 1947 she wrote Final Curtain in which Troy paints the portrait of a great Shakespearian actor, Sir Henry Ancred, as Macbeth, one of his most successful parts. On her way to the Ancreds' mansion Troy reads the play again and finds herself quite shaken by it. That happens again when Sir Henry, during one of the sessions, recites a monologue from it. The completed portrait is supposed to be of an old actor looking back into his past and saying farewell to his part.

The Scottish play is quoted and discussed in a number of other novels. In Surfeit of Lampreys Alleyn meets a constable on the beat who starts talking about seeing and reading the play. His rather artless analysis of it puts his superior officer on the right track. In Colour Scheme, the great actor who is stranded in New Zealand while longing to be back in Britain to help the war effort, recites one of the great soliloquies at a concert. In the second New Zealand novel, Died in the Wool, Florence Ruback, the politician whose murder Alleyn is investigating, is compared to one of the Weird Sisters. Macbeth is quoted by P. E. Garbel in Spinsters in Jeopardy and by Jacko in Opening Night, the latter sending the hopeless Gail Gainsford into floods of hysterics, propelling Martyn Tarne onto the stage and triggering the final catastrophe. In Singing in the Shrouds Alleyn not only quotes Duncan on Cawdor, he also has an argument with the retired schoolmaster, Mr Merryman, about the relative merits of Macbeth and Hamlet on the one hand and Othello and The Duchess of Malfi on the other. The argument provides an important clue. On the other hand, a quotation about Lady Macbeth in Dead Water turns out to be of no significance - Mrs Barrimore (another splendid name with its reference to The Hound of the Baskervilles and the acting dynasty) turns out to be a very different person.

In 1962 Marsh mounted another highly successful production of Macbeth and in January 1982 she completed her last and, perhaps, most difficult novel, Light Thickens. She sent the typescript off on January 7 and died, aged 86, on February 18. The book takes place, once again, at the Dolphin theatre where Peregrine Jay directs what is described by the critics after the first night, the perfect Macbeth. The novel, as usual, deals with the many clashing personalities and intrigues that a theatre consists of and with the details of the casting, props, direction and success, which brings tragedy with it. There is a strong feeling that the tragedy is inevitable, the play being what it is though Alleyn himself refuses to deal with anything but the most human aspect of the crime.

There were problems with the novel, both in the writing of it with Marsh feeling ill and tired and with the subsequent editing. Apparently, the discussion about how to produce Macbeth was considerably longer in the typescript than in the edited novel. Indeed, a great deal of editing had to be done by Elizabeth Walter at Collins. Whether the fact that she could not refer back to the author was a help or a hindrance is not clear. The final product is excellent and a great credit to Dame Ngaio Marsh and her editor.

Tuesday Night Blogs: Ngaio Marsh and the naming of names

As part of this exercise, the results of which can be followed on Moira Redmond's splendid blog, I have been trying to re-read all the Marsh novels in order. Trying and failing with some of them, I have to admit, either because I find Morris dancing intolerably boring especially when it is linked to a description of an old-fashioned feudal village with an old-fashioned feudal lady of the manor (Off With His Head or Death of a Fool in the US) or because some of the novels are just too dull (for instance Swing, Brother, Swing).

I have now entered the post-war period, which produced some excellent novels (Clutch of Constables, Opening Night, When in Rome and Light Thickens are among my favourite Marsh books), some real duds (see above and add Last Ditch to that) and some ho-hum in between ones, one of which is Scales of Justice, the one I have reached.

Scales of Justice is one of the English village mysteries. I have not added them up but it does seem to me that Ngaio Marsh wrote more of them than Agatha Christie did. She certainly had more grand families and continued to have them after the war, when social mores and economic realities changed considerably. Christie knew that but she lived in England. Other writers like E. C. R. Lorac also knew that but she, too, lived in England. Marsh lived mostly in New Zealand and visited England. Her village mysteries were a little uncertain in tone even before the war and became very shaky after it.

To be fair, there are several references, not least by Alleyn, to the fact that the feudal family of Scales of Justice, the Lacklanders, have money and a life style that few can afford in the mid-fifties (the book was published in 1958). Apparently, they are and have always been known as lucky Lacklanders and the money comes from various spectacular sweepstake and racing winnings, none of which would have been taxed. At this point Josephine Tey, who was interested in horses and race meetings, would have shown the Lacklanders as discussing the horses they own and forthcoming events but Marsh does not.

It is the District Nurse who expounds most eloquently the joys of living in a feudal society and resents any suggestion that there might be a few problems underneath the happy and settled surface. (It is not at all clear, incidentally, the Marsh realized that the healthcare system had changed in Britain with the creation, for better or worse, of the NHS.) The reader is slightly disappointed to find at the end of the book that the District Nurse's attitude is that of the novelist's despite one or two tart comments by Alleyn. The outsider turns out to be the murderer, just as everyone had hoped and for whom only Inspector Fox feels any compassion; the shadows of past sins are not simply shortened but practically erased; and Nurse Kettle, like some latter-day Pippa, goes on her way reminding herself that God's in His Heaven and all is right with the part of the world she lives in.

Nurse Kettle! What a wonderful name, evocative of practically everything one knows about nursing and the behaviour of nurses. Then again, the name of the feudal family is Lacklander with an immediate link to English history, particularly to King John Lackland, except that they are lucky and he was not.

This brings me to my main theme, which ties in with a previous posting of mine, about Marsh's wonderful literary abilities: she chose the most evocative names for her characters. Partly, it has to be assumed, this came from her theatrical background with Shakespeare, other Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights as well as seventeenth and eighteenth century comedies for an example.

She herself explained how she arrived at her hero's name: Alleyn after the great Elizabethan actor and founder of Dulwich College, her father's alma mater and Roderick because she had met somebody of that name during a visit to the Highlands of Scotland. When she thought of the woman Alleyn was to fall in love with, she wanted a very plain, worthy first name and an odd surname. She created Agatha Troy, who signed her pictures and was known by all those close to her, including her husband, by the surname, which has a forcefulness that goes well with her personality. Death in White Tie, said Marsh once, could have been called The Siege of Troy, although Alleyn does not use underhand Greek methods.

People who know Alleyn call him Rory and those who know his wife call her Troy but her cousin P. E. Garbel, a slightly confused but very likeable character in Spinsters in Jeopardy, thinks of them as cousins Roddy and Aggie, thus showing her own rather odd way of looking at the world.

There are many examples of the happy naming of names in Marsh's novels. What could be a more splendid name for an actor, playwright, director and theatre manager than Peregrine Jay (Death at the Dolphin and Light Thickens)? The Lampreys were presumably given that surname in order to produce the punning title, which then, sadly, had to be changed for the American audience to Death of a Peer.

Then there is the playwright Aubrey Mandrake in Death and the Dancing Footman, whose original name is Stanley Footling. Both of those are guaranteed to bring a smile to the reader's face. The squire of Pen Cuckoo, who rather fancies himself as a gay dog, has the eighteenth century name Jocelyn Jerningham, while his son goes by the far more sober Henry Jerningham (Overture to Death). The rector of Winston St Giles in the same novel and in Death and the Dancing Footman is Walter Copeland, a name that assures one of his High Church tendencies. His daughter, an actress, is a very modern Diana.

My favourite name is perhaps the doorman's in Opening Night. Fred Badger takes one right back to the rude mechanics of Midsummer Night's Dream.

I am rather fond of Marsh's theatre names as well. The Unicorn turns up in several novels if only in passing mention (there is, in fact, a children's theatre in London called the Unicorn); the Jupiter in the short story I Can Find My Way Out becomes the Vulcan by the time of Opening Night but that does not save it from having another murder; while the Dolphin (vaguely based on the Mermaid though most emphatically on the other side of the Thames) keeps its name and also has a second murder in it. There really is no escape from the Eumenides.

Tuesday Night Blogs: Ngaio Marsh, the occult and related matters

Well, yes, it is once again Wednesday as Tuesday evening went into discussions, dinner and .... well, more discussions. Still, the blog is happening.

Unlike Christie, Marsh did not seem to have any real interest in matters beyond the body. She could not, for instance, have written anything like the strange but weirdly attractive series of stories about Mr Harley Quin. Neither did she seem particularly interested in matters of religion. Or so it would appear. Peering into the novels one sees a slightly more complicated picture.

Occult, as such, is important in three novels, two about somewhat dotty but also very sinister cults, Death in Ecstasy and Spinsters in Jeopardy, and one in which some quite revolting activity grows out of one character's obsession with it, Surfeit of Lampreys.

Marsh, unlike, say, Margaret Millar in How Like An Angel, shows little interest in understanding those who join the two cults though she does have some sympathy for young people who, for whatever reason, have no moral compass to guide them through life and for older lonely ones who are easily exploited by fraudsters and drug dealers. Miss Wade's desolation when the House of the Sacred Flame is closed down and Father Garnette arrested together with the real crook and murderer at the end of Death in Ecstasy is pitiful; similar desolation shown by P. E. Garbel at the end of Spinsters in Jeopardy is more dignified and tragic as well as more hopeful for the future.

In parenthesis one may note that the first of those novels has one of the nastiest pictures of a homosexual couple in Marsh's novels and they are all quite unpleasant. There is a strong implication that the viciousness of homosexuality in young men is not far off the viciousness of people who run such cults for their own nefarious purposes. The second novel describes a somewhat nastier set-up, partly because it is an important link in international drug trading, which becomes Alleyn's preoccupation in the post-war novels, and partly because the real villain (the book is a thriller rather than a detective story so there are no spoilers here) is a revolting and vicious Egyptian who is also, curiously, a very skilled surgeon. Marsh, who wrote sympathetically about Maoris, Africans and a black British doctor in Clutch of Constables, was, for come reason, venomous about Dr Ali Baradi and his servant Mahomet, using every racial cliche she could think of.

So, there is occult to be used in a ridiculous and vicious way for the fleecing and exploiting of vulnerable people, for criminal money making and, in the last resort, for murder. Then there is the occult as practised by the mad and weird Marchioness of Wutherwood and Rune (Aunt V.) in Surfeit of Lampreys. Her behaviour before and, especially, after her husband's murder is so horrible and the rites she carries out are so utterly disgusting that even the hardened nurse faints and the police officers feel a bit queasy. (I shall spare the readers of this blog.)

Here I must pause to wonder about the Ingoldsby Legends, a collection of gruesome and terrifying tales that, as far as one can make it out from Marsh's, Sayers's and other authors' novels, was routinely handed to children to read. How many of them were terrified, given nightmares and traumatized for life by some of those "legends"? How long did this strange educational habit that came close to child abuse continue? There might be a subject for an academic thesis here.

So, Marsh has nothing but disdain for the occult and other-worldly? Not entirely. She shows a great deal of sympathy for Maoris insisting on or returning to their traditional faith and its symbols, whether it is Dr Te Pokiha who explains in Vintage Murder that he can never view the little green jade tiki  as white people do, Rua Te Kahu becoming incensed at the theft of the tapu adze in Colour Scheme or the young actor Rangi who explains in Light Thickens that the theatre and the actors are all tapu until the murder is solved, Marsh displays great sympathy for Maoris who, under pressure, abandon their Western ideas and revert to Maori thinking, illogical and wrong though it seems to most Europeans.

Of course, Maori religion and fetishism is coherent where the occult sects in the two novels use a mish-mash of many religions and mythologies. Also, Marsh may well have felt that respect is due to the Maoris not least because of the way they had been treated in the past. But one cannot help seeing a certain amount of patronizing head-patting in her obvious dislike of anyone who makes a less than complimentary comment about the tiki or the adze or the concept of tapu.

Although she has little time for the occult sects and the mad, haphazard study of it but she does often display sympathy for experience that cannot be described as entirely physical and some forms of belief that go beyond that. Alleyn frequently expresses to himself a slight disdain for religion and in Spinsters in Jeopardy he lumps the obscene and ridiculous mix of many myths and religions  in the House of the Silver Goat together with the far more orthodox beliefs and practices of the devoutly Catholic Raoul and Theresa. The reason he meditates on this subject is because he experiences something that is repeated in several novels: a sensation of stepping outside his body and watching himself from afar, something that can be described as a separation of body and spirit. There is no explanation for this phenomenon but it happens several times and is not dissimilar to Troy's feeling that her work takes on a life of its own and she merely follows it and her genius in producing her paintings. Time and again she steps back after barely existing on a physical level and marvels at what had been produced, apparently outside her control.

Actors in Marsh's novels go through similar experiences. There is a wonderful description of the duality an actor feels when getting into a part - being oneself and the other person, while stepping outside one's body - in Opening Night. We know the New Zealander Martyn Tarne is a good actress because she goes through this experience while the girl she eventually replaces, Gay Gainsford, is not because she does not seem to. But, as we find out, in Death at the Dolphin, it is perfectly possible to be good at acting as a craft without that sort of experience. The Dark Lady is played without much understanding  apart from the fact that the character "sends" Will Shakespeare.

If one takes the notion of creativity as stepping outside oneself, of separating body and spirit then the idea of certain tools of the trade taking on a life of their own becomes credible. Troy's pencils and brushes, the ghastly and murderous Garcia's clay in Artists in Crime, all acquire a life of their own. The most terrifying example of that comes in the last novel, Light Thickens, which, being about a production of Macbeth, deals with magic and witchcraft. The murderer is not hard to work out and much of the interest of the book comes from the descriptions of the theatre and of the production as well as the magical, in various senses of the word, elements. Part of the production is an attempt to have as many of the real weapons as props and the murder is committed by a very special axe, a claidheamh-mor, a deadly weapon that had been used for murder before. It has special properties, insists the murderer, and those who wield it are merely its "demented agents". The possibility of the claidheamh-mor having some special qualities remains with the investigators and the audience though Alleyn refuses to accept it. The murderer, he rightly insists, knew what he was doing.

Tuesday Night Blogs: Ngaio Marsh as writer

For anyone who wants to read last week's blogs on Ngaio Marsh, the links are to be found here, on Moira Redmond's delightful blog Clothes in Books. (What a great idea. I am still mulling over a study on food in detective stories. Move over types of tobacco ash and motets of Lassus.)

As a writer, Dame Ngaio Marsh is one of the best among classic detective story authors. I do know that many people find her plotting a little tedious, what with pages of interrogation by Alleyn and his underlings, something I cannot quite understand. Somebody once said to me that they would have preferred more detection. But interrogation is detection, as much as the finding of a cigarette butt or two is; discussion between police officers can lead one to the right solution and is used extensively in more modern police procedurals. Why not by Marsh?

Julian Symons in his seminal (I use the word advisedly) study of crime and detective literature was disappointed in Marsh.

Ngaio Marsh never went as far as Allingham in attempting to write novels with a detective element, rather than detective stories. Her capacity for amused observation of the undercurrents beneath ordinary social interchanges was so good that one hoped for more than she ever tried to do. The first half of Opening Night (1951) gives a brilliant picture of the intrigues taking place before the opening of a new play. All this is, as it should be, preparation for the murder that takes place, and we hope that after the murder the book will remain in the same key and that the problems will be resolved as they began, in terms of character. To our disappointment, however, Marsh takes refuge from real emotional problems in the official investigation and interrogation of suspects. The temperature is lowered, the mood has been lost. 

Well, I am afraid I disagree with the great man. (I often do with his judgements but for all of that Bloody Murder remains my constant companion and a reference book that has had to be replaced at least once, it was so worn out.) I consider Marsh to be a far better writer than Allingham though neither of them is another Dostoyevsky who did, indeed, write novels with a detective element. That does not seem to me to be such a problem as we need both Dostoyevsky and ordinary crime writers.

Allingham started writing in her teens and was, obviously, a very precocious youngster. The trouble is that, in my opinion, her writing continued to be that of a precocious youngster even when she was considerably older. Marsh, on the other hand, had the ability to describe people, places and events in a way that stay with the reader long after the reading of the book.

The beginning of Opening Night is, indeed, very good and the description of the newly arrived young actress from New Zealand, Martyn Tarne, going from theatre to theatre to find a job and beginning almost to hallucinate from exhaustion and hunger is superb. Far better, dare I say it, than anything Allingham could ever manage. The subsequent description of the theatrical intrigues is, as Julian Symons says, highly entertaining and the solution does depend on certain aspects of personalities. The victim is killed because of what he is and the murderer's motivation could not be any other person's.

There are many other such incidents. Peregrine Jay's (a great name for an actor and playwright) fall into the filthy water and his despair and disgust when he nearly drowns in it, surrounded as he is by lavatorial discards, is one such excellently described scene in Death at the Dolphin.

Then there is the beginning of Black As He Is Painted (a novel with many faults) when a newly retired top civil servant, wondering what he is going to do with his life, goes to see a house on a whim and is bewitched by it and by a cat who is determined to adopt him. His attempts to resist the lure of both house and cat fail as we know they would.

There are two more aspects to Marsh's writing that are worth emphasising and both have to do with her ability to create strong characters who develop through the series (though, inevitably, Superintendent Alleyn who is 47 in 1943, goes on working far beyond retirement age).

Alleyn starts off in A Man Lay Dead (or A Man Laid An Egg as Marsh herself described it later in her life) and in Enter A Murderer, the only theatrical book of hers that is not a success, as a sort of sub-Wimsey type farceur who produces inappropriate quotations and makes facetious comments that annoy everybody in sight. He gradually discards some of his most annoying habits though they are revived whenever Nigel Bathgate happens to be around. In the fifth book Artists in Crime, he meets the artist Agatha Troy, a character Marsh was very fond of, and from then on he really does become a human being. She accepts him in the following book, Death in White Tie, so we are spared the lengthy courtship of Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane or of Albert Campion and Lady Amanda Fitton.

Subsequent novels show them together or Alleyn writing letters to her and in two novels Troy plays an important part by herself. Her art remains of paramount importance. Marsh succeeds in creating a good and believable marriage between her detective and a strong professional woman, something Sayers did not, in the end, attempt and Allingham failed in. Amanda Campion as an aeronautical engineer remains less than credible; Troy Alleyn as an artist is completely real.

Partly that is because of Marsh's other strength: her ability to describe creative work. I have never been able to believe in P. D. James's Adam Dalgliesh as a poet but have absolute faith in Troy as a great artist or in Peregrine Jay as a playwright. Descriptions of Troy painting Sir Henry Ancred as an actor looking back on himself playing Macbeth or her little boy Ricky as creation of air and light are vivid and entirely believable. The only novel where this process fails is Black As He Is Painted where Troy's portrait is overwhelmed by some weird nostalgia for savagery. It is not actually a particularly good book, despite that wonderful beginning but an interesting picture of a certain period in history, the immediate post-colonial one.

In Death At The Dolphin Peregrine Jay writes and directs a play about Shakespeare, his little son Hamnet and the Dark Lady. It has always been a matter of some annoyance to me that the play does not exist. I should love to have seen it as I should have loved to have seen the weird and spectacular production, also directed by Jay, of Macbeth in Light Thickens. The tedious sub-expressionist melodrama Thus To Revisit in Opening Night, on the other hand, I can well do without.

It is a rare gift to be able to describe any other person's creativity and to make it so real and so vivid. Ngaio Marsh managed it but she remained, quite stubbornly, a writer of crime stories, mostly detective one, a couple of espionage ones and one straightforward thriller. Mr Symons did not approve.

Tuesday Night Blogs: Ngaio Marsh and Watsonism

Those Tuesday Night Blogs did go on but last month's subject was Ellery Queen and, although I have read a great many of the novels and short stories and consider Ellery Queen and his creators to be of pivotal importance to the history of the genre, I could not think of anything to say that might be even of fractional interest. So different with Dame Ngaio Marsh: I have already lined up several subjects I want to write about and here is the first one: is Nigel Bathgate, the journalist, Roderick Alleyn's Watson?

He is certainly described by many as such by critics and historians of the genre as well as various biographers of Dame Ngaio (her damehood was earned by her work in the New Zealand theatre, which she and everyone else considered more important than her 'tec fiction). Bathgate describes himself as such on a number of occasions and several times he is given that role in the list of characters that the highly theatrical author provided at the beginning of her novels. At other times he is described as a journalist or just simply as Mr Nigel Bathgate (Final Curtain). He does not appear in all or even in the majority of the novels, only in seven of the pre-war ones and two of the post-war ones. His final appearance is in the very weak and wooden Swing, Brother, Swing, in which he is not a Watson but merely a journalist who is after a story and is, in return, prepared to give some information about a somewhat ridiculous magazine Harmony and its contributors. Thereafter he is not seen again though, one must assume that his and his wife's friendship with Alleyn and Troy goes on. For one thing, Alleyn is the young Bathgate's godfather.

Watsonism, to use Dorothy L. Sayers's expression is a curious phenomenon and, it would appear, poorly understood even by practitioners, let alone critics. Miss Sayers, naturally enough, understood it well and talked about it very interestingly in her discussion of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. But others find the whole thing more difficult. Sandra Roy, for instance, in her book on Josephine Tey suggests that at the beginning Sergeant Williams is Inspector Grant's Watson, a preposterous suggestion, as a Watson cannot be the detective's professional subordinate. Dr Thorndyke's several Watsons are themselves legal medicos - they just do not happen to be brilliant.

As it happens there is another character who claims to be Alleyn's Watson when Bathgate is absent from the plot and that is Col. the Hon. Maxwell Barrington, the preposterous and highly irritating Chief Constable in Death at the Bar. In between breaking every traffic law, snitching cigarettes from anyone who happens to be around and irritating his subordinates Colonel Barrington tells the Chief-Inspector that he wants to be his Watson and that consists of him not listening to any of the conclusions the police have come to but taking away all the notes and trying to work out the solution for himself. When he does so, he expounds it at great length and with mock-modesty as an "essay in Watsoniana", inviting Alleyn to destroy all his arguments. Needless to say, he is deeply shocked when Alleyn does so and even more so when he finds out that the local Inspector had come to the right conclusion and at least one of his great deductions had been made by the inn-keeper's son as well.

Of course, simply looking at all the evidence and getting it wrong is not the only and not even the most important characteristic of Watsonism. A Watson is the detective's companion who is not stupid (with the exception of Captain Hastings) but not brilliant either, he follows the investigation and makes some deductions, which are usually though not absolutely inevitably wrong and he writes up the cases in one way or another. Above all, the story is told from the Watson's point of view whether it is in the first or the third person.

Does Nigel Bathgate confirm to those characteristics? Well, no.

He is very rarely Alleyn's companion from the beginning. In two novels, A Man Lay Dead and Death in Ecstasy he is there from the start of events because he is himself involved. In both of them he is, in fact, the outsider from whose point of view part of the story is written. In only one, Enter a Murderer, does he accompany Alleyn from the very beginning: a friend of Felix Gardener, the star of the play The Rat and the Beaver, he is given two tickets and, his fiancée, Angela being out of town, he invites his friend the Chief Inspector to accompany him. As Alleyn explains at the end, there was a unique aspect to the play [SPOILER ALERT]:

Thanks to you I was able to watch the murder in comfort from a fifteen-and-sixpenny stall provided by the murderer. 

In the other novels Bathgate is visited by Alleyn, who refers to him as his Boswell rather than his Watson, for a discussion (The Nursing Home Murder) or he manages to muscle his way in as a friendly journalist who will help in return for a scoop and is ready to submit to Alleyn's censorship (Artists in Crime and Overture to Death).  In Surfeit of Lampreys he is summoned by that obnoxious family to help them in their difficulties and is seen by the outsider whose point of view is followed through most of the book, Roberta Gray, as a pleasant, red-faced young man with a moustache.

Bathgate's own comment is: "As you know I'm Alleyn's Watson." Alleyn describes him as "keeping a briefing watch" and adds:

Bathgate is remarkably well equipped as a liaison officer between the press, yourselves and the police.

Somehow one cannot imagine Sherlock Holmes saying that about Dr Watson. Bathgate, one assumes, remains the Alleyns' friend but is ever more distant from the investigation. In Final Curtain he is seen briefly, still in uniform though he is back at his job as a journalist (could he have been a military correspondent during the war?) when he hands over his description of the rather ghastly Ancred family whose patriarch, the great Sir Henry Ancred, the GOM of British theatre, Troy is about to paint. He is then heard on the telephone informing Alleyn of the latest development in the twisted saga of the Ancred Will.

The final appearance is in Swing, Brother, Swing where he is described as of the Evening Chronicle, having been of the Evening Mirror before the war. As usual, he appears in Alleyn's office, hoping for a scoop and is allowed in on some of the investigation though considerably less than in the earlier novels. In return he provides information about the world of journalism.

It is true that in the earlier novels Bathgate, usually with his fiancée Angela North is sent off to find out a few things about the doings of some ridiculous Soviet club (A Man Lay Dead and The Nursing Home Murder) or to discuss matters with a suspect or two (Death in Ecstasy). He is asked several times to sit quietly in the corner and take short-hand notes and off his own bat he produces notes and summaries of the cases, which may or may not help Alleyn. He also writes the cases up in his "rag" though we never read those articles and assume them to be on the popular side. He writes about Alleyn between cases as well and is, probably, the author of that embarrassing soubriquet "Handsome Alleyn".

Above all, we do not see events from his point of view except in the two that he begins by being invited to a country house week-end (A Man Lay Dead) or by wandering into the ceremony of a shady cult and witnessing a murder (Death in Ecstasy). Ngaio Marsh was quite fond of the outsider from whose point of view all or part of the novel is written and in those two it happened to be Bathgate. In others we have two recent arrivals from New Zealand (Roberta Gray in A Surfeit of Lampreys and Martyn Tarne in Opening Night), the secretary of a great Shakespearian actor, stuck in New Zealand during the war and longing to get back to Britain (Colour Scheme) or even Troy Alleyn (Artists in Crime, Final Curtain and, especially, A Clutch of Constables). The tiresome Ricky Alleyn acts as the outsider in Last Ditch. Other novels have other outsiders but once the investigation begins, with very few exceptions, it is Alleyn from whose point of view the story is told. There is no Watson in those novels.

It would be interesting to know why Marsh abandoned Bathgate after Swing, Brother, Swing. He could have carried on being a journalist who popped up from time to time, offering help and demanding a (moderated) scoop, giving news of his wife and son, who is Alleyn's godson, taking the Alleyns and their friend Katti Bostock out to the theatre as it is mentioned at the beginning of Final Curtain. For some reason she decided against that.