Few, if any, New Zealanders have reached a wider global audience than Ngaio Marsh. She was a queen of popular culture when the writers of crime fiction were numbered among its royalty. She began her career when her crime novel
A Man Lay Deadwas published in London in 1934, and continued to write books at the rate of one every eighteen months to two years until her death in 1982. Over a career that spanned nearly fifty years she published thirty-two novels and numerous short stories, children’s stories and articles. Her extraordinary talent and prodigious output elevated her to the pantheon of crime fiction writing. She was known as one of the four Queens of Crime, along with Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and Margery Allingham.
In 1966 Marsh was made a Dame of the British Empire, for
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Citation: Drayton, Joanne Gale. "Dame Ngaio Marsh". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 April 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2951, accessed 24 November 2024.]
