The NZ Series #18 - Ngaio Marsh

Being a Kiwi myself, living in Ngaio, it was a bit embarrassing having to be told by a Londoner about Dame Ngaio Marsh and her berets (but still, thanks very much Jolyon!).

Dame Ngaio Marsh (1895 – 1982), born Edith Ngaio Marsh, was a New Zealand crime writer and theatre director. There is some uncertainty over her birth date as her father neglected to register her birth until 1900. She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1966.

She studied painting at the Canterbury College School of Art before becoming an actress with the Allan Wilkie company touring New Zealand. From 1928 onward she divided her time between living in the United Kingdom and in her native New Zealand.

Internationally she is best known for her 32 detective novels published between 1934 and 1982. Along with Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Agatha Christie, she has been classed as one of the four original "Queens of Crime"—female writers who dominated the crime fiction genre in the Golden Age of the 1920s and 1930s.