Before we get started with today's show, I want to tell you about another podcast you should check out.

The lonely palette is a show that aims to make art history accessible, enjoyable and fun, one artwork at a time. Each episode, host and recovering art historian Tamar Avishai,

Pixen Artwork, plants herself in front of it at the museum and interviews unsuspecting

passers-by to record their first impressions and descriptions.

Then, in a 15-20 minute audio essay, she dives deeply into the object, the movement, the social context, and anything and everything else that will make it as exciting to you as it is to her.

With high quality production values, evocative music cues and a warm friendly tone that is both intelligent and welcoming,

the lonely palette acts as both a witty and compelling museum companion, and a narrative radio show

about the visual world.

In the words of podcast inventor Christopher Leiden

this is what those snooze-a-thon museum audio guides should be.

Find it now at the Lonely Palat. com or wherever you get your podcasts.

Now on with the show.

By any definition, Nio Marsh lived an extraordinary life.

She was the longest lived of the four Queens of Crime from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction in the 1920s and 30s, and was made a dame

by the Queen of England for her services to theatre in her native New Zealand.

Thanks to her 32 Detective novels, Marsh is still that country's best-selling ever author.

She travelled regularly between Britain and New Zealand at a time when the trip took weeks rather than hours,

and was a keen painter and a journalist as well as an author.

Yet she was also an intensely private person who only shared a little of herself with acquaintances and fans.

She never married or had children and destroyed many of her letters and papers before her death.

Her books of course remain widely read,

but in the UK in the US she isn't quite as popular say as Agatha Christie or Dorothy

...