Ngaio Marsh: Black Beech and Honeydew

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Ngaio Marsh begins her autobiography with a moment in which she recollects perfect happiness.

"Bliss, you might call it," she writes before employing a little aside of self-admonishment: "Only I don't want to kill the recollection with high words."

Black Beech and Honeydew was first published in either 1966 or 1965 (both dates are given), revised and updated in 1981 and is now reissued, 21 years later, as a "commemoration of Ngaio Marsh's life and work".

It is quite a lovely book in a gentle, elusive way. It is a relic of an autobiography. It does not tell all - or even very much at all - about the private life of the detective-story writer.

Fittingly, it gives clues. "I always, by an involuntary act of defensiveness, return to my everyday self: so, I find, have I withdrawn from writing about experiences which have most closely concerned and disturbed me. I have been deflected by my own reticence."

That is a very old-fashioned piece of writing, down to its construction.

Reticence is an old-fashioned concept but of course autobiography only ever reveals what its writer is prepared to offer up. And you may think, for example, that you learned more about Martin Amis' teeth than you ever wanted to know.

Marsh does not trouble us with her dental problems, or with her love life. She does not bore us with her health problems, although she refers to them. Her bank accounts remain a closed book.

But she does write some glorious sentences.

On a Spanish driver: "He was incandescent with garlic."

On a pony called Dolly: "She was a pretty mettlesome little creature."

Now there's a nice and much-neglected word.

There are engagingly of-another-age characters, like Gramps, who "would sit on the verandah apostrophising the city on the plains with as much energy as if it had been Gomorrah itself." He was much given to imaginative cussing: "Generation of vipers!" he would groan. "Sycophantic dolts! Perfidious beasts!" The city of sin on the plains was Christchurch.

A theft from the theatre is referred to as a "scurvy trick".

Anyone who expects autobiography, particularly an autobiography of a writer, to raise eyebrows, to snipe and scandalise, might well think this one is a bit of a scurvy trick.

I think $21.95 is a steal for the "incandescent with garlic" line alone - I fully intend to pinch it sometime.

* HarperCollins $21.95

* Michele Hewitson is a Herald features journalist.