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The Empress of Crime's life was the ultimate detective story – revealed for the first time in this forthright and perceptive biography.While Ngaio Marsh had a flamboyant public persona, she was fiercely protective of her private life. And no one knows better how to cover tracks with red herrings and remove incriminating evidence than a crime fiction writer…This fascinating biography of Ngaio Marsh pieces together both the public and private Marsh in a way that is as riveting as a crime novel. Through her writing and her theatre work, Joanne Drayton assembles the pieces to the puzzle that is Marsh, proving that life can be as thrilling as fiction. Marsh wrote her first detective novel in a London flat in the depths of the 1930s Depression, bringing life to Detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn in her first book, A Man Lay Dead. Through 32 novels he would establish himself as one of the great super-sleuths, and Marsh as one of the four Queens of Golden Age detective fiction, alongside Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and Margery Allingham.In 1932, a family tragedy brought Marsh home to New Zealand, to a life divided – between hemispheres, between passionate relationships at home and abroad, and between the world of publishing and her life as a stage director. In 1949 her writing would earn her the ultimate distinction when Penguin and Collins released the 'Marsh Million': 100,000 copies each of ten of her titles on to the world market. The popular appetite for classic whodunits was insatiable and Ngaio Marsh was one of the best. But her greatest love was the stage – or was it?

A rich historical biography of ‘those wicked wicked Wyndhams’ – three beautiful, cultured aristocratic sisters born into immense wealth in late Victorian Britain.Mary, Madeline and Pamela – the three Wyndham sisters – were raised surrounded by the work of the Pre-Raphaelites, in a family famed for its bohemian closeness. The liberal upbringing of these handsome, intelligent daughters of a maverick politician and an artistic but emotionally unstable mother prompted one family to forbid their offspring ever to play with ‘those wild Wyndham children’.In adulthood, the sisters became intimate with ‘the Souls’, an intellectual and flirtatious aristocratic set, whose permissive beliefs scandalised society. Eldest and youngest sister became the objects of press fascination as the confidantes of great statesman – Mary of Prime Minister Arthur Balfour; Pamela of the Liberal politician Edward Grey. Madeline had the only happy marriage of the three.Their lives were intertwined with some of the most celebrated and scandalous figures of the day: Oscar Wilde, who fell in love with their cousin Bosie Douglas; Marie Stopes, to whom Pamela became patron; and the iconoclast poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, lover both of Mary and her mother before her. Their lives would be irrevocably devastated by the horrors of the First World War.In their first ever biography, Claudia Renton, drawing on a rich archive of letters, charts these women’s intimate stories in their own voices, from romantic beginnings through the passions and disappointments of womanhood to the tragedy that brought a definitive end to their era, against the backdrop of the political and social events that shaped their age. Those Wild Wyndhams is an unforgettable historical biography that captures the high drama of this grand family against the political and social events that shaped their age.