ABSTRACT
Ngaio Marsh did so much important work as a theatre director that she was made Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1966. But she also killed more actors than the plague. Ten of this Crime Queen’s detective novels between 1934 and 1982 are set amidst theatrical performance, making her the most prolific theatre-novelist ever. If what I call “backstage detective fiction” seems incongruous with previous chapters’ focus on writers as esteemed as James and Woolf, I propose to take the subgenre seriously. Acutely conscious of the perils of theatre’s reliance on collaboration and susceptibility to human “accident,” Marsh reveals a profound affiliation with modernist director Edward Gordon Craig, notorious for his own assaults on actors. But this investigation also suggests a second, more deadly culprit, appropriately concealed by the praise Marsh heaps on him: Russian director Constantin Stanislavski. I argue that her backstage detective fiction both registers and responds to intensified anxieties about real human emotion on modern stages.
