The Dance of the Five Sons: 'Off With His Head' by Ngaio Marsh

The New Zealand-born writer Ngaio Marsh is often seen as one of the ‘Queens of Crime’ of the interwar period and beyond, along with Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham. Mostly her novels are vivid and ingenious puzzle mysteries, some involving the theatrical world, which she knew well. But occasionally she offers a more unusual setting, as in Off With His Head (1957), another notable example of the use in crime fiction of folklore and the uncanny, as we have already seen with Gladys Mitchell.

In reading previous Marsh novels, I had noticed that she is particularly good at atmospheric writing, evoking wild landscape and brooding weather, yet she does this only briefly, perhaps because thrillers have to prioritise pace. I thought it was a pity she never developed this kind of writing in other directions, but she clearly preferred to stick faithfully to her chosen genre.

However, in the first third of this book, she does allow herself to conjure up some compelling scenes surrounding an ancient ritual. It starts with a doughty scholar who is a luminary in the ‘Friends of English Folklore’ and several similar societies. A bequest of manuscripts has led her to truffle out a previously little-known sword dance custom at a prehistoric standing stone in the obscure village of Mardian: The Dance of the Five Sons. She journeys there at midwinter in deep snow and, though her prying is not welcome, can scarcely be turned away from the village inn during such inclement weather.

Such sword dances are a genuine winter custom, mostly from the North of England, studied by the noted Edwardian folklorist Cecil Sharp, for example in The Sword Dances of Northern England (several volumes, 1911-1913). They were once a widespread custom: researcher John Ledbury ('The historical evidence for sword-dancing in Britain', in Rattle Up My Boys, An Occasional Broadsheet for Those With An Interest in Sword Dance, Issue 3, Series 4, Autumn 1993) identified examples in over a hundred locations in the North. Though some claims to great antiquity are made, the earliest specifically recorded are from the 15th century. But that shows only when the custom enters the written record. Since by then it seems to have been regarded as a well-established tradition, an inference that it was already over a hundred years old or more takes us back at least to the medieval period.

Marsh clearly knows and relishes the background to the subject, though she moves it to the West Country, a region she was more familiar with and liked. She provides highly vivid and convincing depictions of a midwinter ritual involving a morris dance, a hobby horse, a ‘betty’ (a young man in drag), a bonfire, torches, and culminating in the intricate sword dance. There is a patina of satire, but Marsh treats the custom with a certain respect and a keen insight into the secrecy, jealousy and solemnity it entails. This is not a quaint survival or revival for the benefit of tourists, but a matter of fierce family and local pride, with all its elements rigorously insisted upon.

Her cast of characters is also well-chosen and subtly portrayed: a trenchant nonagenarian dame at the castle; a mild-mannered parson; a brisk local doctor; the Five Sons of the village blacksmith; the blacksmith himself, who is the leader of the ritual, called the Guiser; and his niece, a young actor who has had a genteel education and so is set apart from the family, yet still feels the draw of its ancient custom. As with the Mitchell book, this beginning would work admirably as the setting for a supernatural story.

But this is a crime story, and the title of the novel rather gives the game away about the fate of one of those in the sword dance. The story turns from one of folklore to detection. Marsh’s series character, urbane and gentlemanly Scotland Yard official Roderick Alleyn, arrives to solve the case. Since several of the participants in the rite were masked or had painted faces, and their dances were intricate, it will be no easy task to work out who did what, when.

The remaining two thirds of the novel follow the trajectory of a classic detection story, with a series of set-piece interviews with the witnesses (many of them also suspects), each of which gives a slightly different perspective and a variety of clues. The novel culminates, however, with Alleyn (not altogether plausibly) leading a reconstruction of the ritual, with the original participants, and this provides some further eerie scenes, especially when the victim appears to re-emerge.

The whodunnit element is artful enough, but I found that once the opening scenes of the ritual were past, the plot became a bit routine, even rather ponderous. The structure places all the high drama, arcane imagery and wintry atmosphere at the front of the novel. The doughty folklorist (one could imagine her played by Margaret Rutherford) is then scuttled off into the wings when such a colourful character needed to remain more centre-stage.

I couldn’t help thinking that the convincingly invented rituals were rather wasted, and that this is an example of a novel where the need to bring in the familiar series detective and for him to follow his procedures rather prevented a stronger, stranger story. Even so, the well-realised folkloric element does give the book an unusual uncanny dimension.

(Mark Valentine)