Colonial Futures: Ngaio Marsh, War and the End of Empire

Between the years of 1941 and 1945, Ngaio Marsh published three New Zealand-focused whodunnits; all three of these stories explore the impacts of the Second World War to some degree. That Marsh wrote about the war is not in itself surprising; however, her sustained focus on New Zealand and New Zealanders, given that Marsh’s fiction usually took place in London or its surrounding counties, is unusual within her oeuvre. It marks the impact on Marsh of the global conflict that was changing the world and shaking the foundations of colonialism and modernity as they had been known before 1939. In this essay, I explore how these three novels show Marsh placing young New Zealanders, mostly women, at the centre of the future of the British Empire, and Aotearoa within it. Marsh saw that the Second World War forced a mapping out of colonial futures that constituted a break from the past, and where the energy for change and renewal would come from outside London, the British Empire’s metropolis.