During what is usually referred to as the Golden Age of the detective story, Ngaio Marsh was one of a small group of British mystery writers who set standards of characterization, sophisticated dialogue, and imaginative puzzles which broadened the audience for the genre from people who read them as thrillers to those who read them for many of the same reasons they read mainstream fiction. In a career that spanned almost half a century, her popularity grew steadily, and she became as popular in the United States as she was in England and her native New Zealand.

Born in Christchurch on 23 April 1899, Marsh first studied painting, entering art school when she was fifteen, but her great love was always the theater. Her parents, Henry Edmund and Rose Elizabeth Seager Marsh, had been amateur actors, and she called the appearances of Allan Wilkie's Shakespearean troupe in Christchurch "one of...