Three New Zealanders: Ngaio Marsh

Here is this governess in a gentile Canterbury home reading to a little girl, not of fairies or well-behaved Victorian heroes but of King Lear, Shakespeare at his most cataclysmic speaking of cruelty.

– Narrator, on Ngaio's childhood being read to by Ms Ffitch

I'd read a detective novel ... and I thought I wonder if I could do this sort of thing. There was a little stationery shop around the corner, ... I went round there and bought some penny exercise books and a pencil. It poured with rain all the next day and I wrote quite a lot of A Man Lay Dead.

– Dame Ngaio Marsh, on writing her first book

.. it’s [...] gratitude that we all feel to her for leading us towards an extra dimension in our lives that we wouldn’t otherwise perhaps have had.

– A close friend on working with Ngaio