Ngaio Marsh was born and educated in New Zealand. Along with Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham and Dorothy L. Sayers, she was deemed one of the four original 'Queens of Crime' - female British writers who dominated the crime fiction genre in the 1920s and 1930s. She was knighted a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1966. Ngaio Marsh died in 1982. Scales of Justice was first published in 1955