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intruder & I drew away from the window. But I couldn’t help listening.’ For a long time there was silence, then the faint tinkle of a shop bell. They had gone indoors—they would be gone for good. The scene was ominous, and Ngaio knew it. ‘It seemed to me that the little town was threatened with madness, that a great surge of lethal insanity was rolling up the Mosel like a tidal wave & that these peasants with their little dram of Jewish blood were doomed.’
    Ngaio wrote when she could during the day and late at night. She sat out on the battlements or in the Lippmanns’ terraced garden among carnations and ‘night-scented stocks’ and worked on Death in a White Tie. They savoured the delights of the wine cellar. They paddled and swam in the Mosel River and collected strawberries from the nearby woods, where one afternoon they met a young New Zealander who proclaimed the wonders of Nazi Germany. But all the time there were signs that something heinous was happening. Ngaio saw a group of small schoolboys on holiday with their teacher. All day he drilled them. ‘ They even bathed to orders bobbing up & down in routine & morning & evening they recited a sort of creed ending with their drawn out cry—“Heil Hitler”.’ A vitriolic denunciation of the Jews was nailed to cottage doors in Beilstein. The people were frightened, and their fear was infectious. As soon as Betty Cotterill was well, the New Zealanders left.
    Their ‘journey through 6 realms’ would take them ‘from London to Vienna’, but sadly the rest of their itinerary was unrecorded. Ngaio met up with Nelly Rhodes in October and they holidayed in Monte Carlo. Unlike the publicly documented road trip, this was a private meeting of close friends. During her 1937-38 English visit, Ngaio spent a considerable amount of time with the Rhodes family. She stayed with them for a while in an old schoolhouse, and at country residences. It is likely Ngaio was with Nelly when she toured Devon and Cornwall in early 1938, and stayed in the fishing village of Polperro on the Cornish coast. Ngaio developed a great affection for the Rhodes children, who were getting older and more interesting, and during this visit she illustrated ‘Over the Edge of the Earth’, a children’s story written by Eileen, the eldest Rhodes daughter. The slightly stiff pen-and-ink illustrations have a redeeming, surreal quality that is intriguing. Unfortunately, the enthusiastically conceived joint project was never published.
    In 1938, Ngaio had the thrill of seeing a pair of titles published that represented the fruition of nearly two years’ hard work. Artists in Crime and Death in a White Tie were well received by British and American critics. There was a sense that her stature had not yet been fully recognized. ‘Miss Marsh is a novelist of variety as well as an expert craftsman of crime,’ wrote the critic for Punch in February 1938. ‘She deserves to be much better known.’ There was an appreciation, too, of her ingenuity and sheer brilliance at evoking a grisly scene. The critic for the Church Times described the second murder in Artists in Crime, as ‘probably the best bit of crime writing of the year’, and, in the opinion of The Observer, Ngaio Marsh specialized in ‘cunning and novel modes of inflicting death’ and had a ‘bold and happy gift of portraiture’.
    The reception of Death in a White Tie a little later in the year was equally enthusiastic, although, as Edmund Cork had predicted, there were mixed responses to the introduction of Alleyn’s love interest. ‘Death in a White Tie is the best type of detective story and well up to Miss Marsh’s previous high standards,’ wrote the reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement, in September.
[It] has only one serious defect. The chief inspector is made to pursue his love affair…It would be a pity if the example set by Miss Sayers with Lord Peter Wimsey of entangling her detective of seemingly settled and