Ngaio Marsh Cuts The Cake At The Crime Club Party

Press, Issue 29236, 21 June 1960, Page 2

Ngaio Marsh Cuts The Cake At The Crime Club Party

(N.Z. Press

LONDON, June 20. A large birthday cake, studded with a skull and crossbones and a pistol, was cut by Ngaio Marsh during a party given by the Crime Club in London. The party was held to celebrate the club’s thirtieth anniversary and Mias Marsh’s twenty-first ’ book, and to announce the winners of a Crime Club competition. Before using the knife, Miss Marsh revealed that the victim of her book had also cut a birthday cake and had been found

dead shortly afterwards. Miss Marsh seemed not the slightest disturbed by this fictional "fact.’’ With a number of other crime writers she admitted her characters were based on people she knows.

Thus her Superintendent Alleyn is based on her father. "He was a good shot, and fond of country pursuits,” she said. Cecil Day Lewis, former Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and who writes under the -name of Nicholas Blake, said his character, Nigel Strangeways. was modelled on the poet, W. H. Auden, who is at present Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Strangeways is an “eccentric, featureless character’’ and Lewis regards him as a “piece of blotting paper soaking up impressions, sights, and sounds.” lan Fleming, creator of James Bond, said: ”1 based him on the Commandos and the spies I met

during the war. He is hardly a character —just somebody everything happens to. I want him that way. That is why I wouldn’t call him Peregrine Carruthers, for instance.” One winner of the Crime Club competition was Reginald White, a Cambridge history don, who was awarded £lOOO for his “The Smartest Grave.”

‘‘My murderer,” he said, “is a complete scoundrel, humbug, and hypocrite but my policeman is just someone who was there because I felt I ought to have someone to solve things.” Cecil Jenkins, a history lecturer at Exeter University, won the other £lOOO with “Message From Sirius." He confessed his DetectiveSuperintendent Ireland is not based on anybody, but “just grew up.”

N.Z. Founders’ Society.—A talk entitled “Inside New China" was given by Miss Irene Young at a meeting of the Christchurch branch of the New Zealand Founders’ Society. Coloured alidm iUuotmtod the talk.