Ngaio Marsh

Dame Ngaio Marsh was a New Zealand crime writer, one of the 'Queens of Crime' alongside Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Margery Allingham, best known for her 32 detective novels featuring Inspector Roderick Alleyn. Born in Christchurch, she pursued interests in theater, directing acclaimed Shakespearean productions, and wrote her first novel A Man Lay Dead in 1934 while in London. She was knighted as a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1966 for her services to theatre and literature, and never married.