Ngaio Marsh was educated at St Margaret's College in Christchurch, New Zealand. 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.
She was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1966.
Internationally she is best known for her 32 detective novels published between 1934 and 1982. Along with Agatha
Christie, Margery Allingham and Dorothy L. Sayers, she was classed as one of the four original "Queens of Crime" - female
British crime writers who dominated the crime fiction genre in the Golden Age of the 1920s and 1930s.
All her novels feature British CID detective Roderick Alleyn. Several novels feature Marsh's other loves, the theatre
and painting. A number are set around theatrical productions (Enter a Murderer, Vintage Murder, Overture to Death,
Opening Night, Death at the Dolphin, and Light Thickens), and two others about actors off stage (Final Curtain and False
Scent). Her short story "'I Can Find My Way Out" is also set around a theatrical production and is the earlier "Jupiter case"
referred to in Opening Night. Alleyn marries a painter, Agatha Troy, whom he meets during an investigation (Artists in Crime),
and who features in several later novels.
