at least twice in my life i have had the complete works of margery allingham, but i keep finding that some have been lost. the detective story collection is stored in the guest bedroom and over the years i have found that the allinghams effortlessly top the list of most frequently stolen books (i stole half of it from my mother in the first place ;, butcher paper and ads for kolynos toothpaste or funky “a” on the back). Quite a few people pass through this house, and it only occurs to me that the guests take an allingham to read in bed, get hooked and take it with them. I can’t think of any other writer to have this effect, certainly not among interwar queens of crime.
agatha christie and ngaio marsh focus primarily on “how”. His characterization is crude, a set of quirks and characteristic statements—Poirot’s “little gray cells”—while the actual writing is undemanding. Once the puzzle has been solved, there’s no point in looking at the book again: if you accidentally pick up a Christie you’ve read before, you drop it again as soon as you realize it’s the one that turns out to be the killer. being the butler’s identical twin brother. Gladys Mitchell’s books that you are sometimes, but not inevitably, happy to revisit. he produced over 60 masterpieces and the occasional kinky masterpiece (Moonrise is my favorite).
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by contrast, all of the allingham novels (except perhaps the first two), like those of dorothy sayers, will endure a good deal of rereading. But despite her considerable intelligence and artistry, and her blatant feminism, Sayers’ fiction is rendered difficult to read by its snobbery and racism. She clearly viewed working-class people as lesser than Mr. Pedro effortlessly superior, and she was deeply anti-Semitic. This is not a problem with Allingham, who was a person of genuinely broad human sympathy. for example, usually in interwar detective stories, maids appear as old drunks and imbeciles. but miss diane in the beckoning lady is an accurately observed character with a story and some inner life, presented without condescension.
allingham also has the huge advantage over sayers of loving her hero, but not being in love with him. Albert Campion begins his career as a peter wimsey-esque town chump, but quickly settles down into a much more mature and thoughtful persona that is palpably affected by the changing textures of English life between the early 1990s. 1930s and late 1930s. 60s after the war, it is becoming increasingly clear that Campion’s real business is with counterintelligence (Allingham greatly admired Le Carré), and the detective stories are mere interruptions to a professional life lived not in the books, but among them.
is the least intriguing of the great crime novel writers. the question that always interests you most is “why”. its plot is a device for expressing character: why specific people are driven to do the things they do, a concern that significantly advanced the genre. One aspect of the books’ enduring appeal of hers is that she was genuinely interested in how a life that seems monumentally strange from the outside can be normalcy for one particular person. what does “ordinary” mean to a dodgy undertaker, perhaps, or a retired showgirl. it is this power of observation that has often caused people to regard her as “Dickensian”. Dickens invented surprisingly little, but she walked around London (she was a great walker) and kept her eyes and ears open.
allingham, while moving in shops, trains or buses, on the street, he did the same. as her books show, she was a shameless spy. fat and friendly, she wandered through life looking innocuous and easy to talk to, and the troublemakers, the boastful or just plain weird gravitated towards her. there is a certain advantage for a female novelist in being middle-aged and overweight. she acquires a curious social invisibility: strangers sometimes act in front of you as if you were not there; or if they do happen to strike up a conversation, they speak, at times, with a surprising lack of inhibition. Allingham’s uncontrollable weight was a source of anxiety and anguish in her life (she stemmed from a thyroid problem), and she was often sad and anxious, but she kept her sorrows strictly to herself. the people she met found her charming, friendly and cheerful, and she made good use of this. she listened and remembered, not only what people said, but how they said it. she has as good an ear for the peculiarities of individual speech as any English novelist, and a great gift for seeing what is in front of her. As with Dickens, the panorama of human oddities that she presents reflects reality. I grew up in London and have been very given to talking to strangers. Over the years, I’ve come across quite a few London characters who could have come straight out of one of her books.
Another thing that makes his books worth revisiting is that he has a keen sense of place. many of them are love songs to london itself, where she lived on and off throughout her life. she could do mayfair when she wanted, but she was very observant of the dilapidated working-class areas, which to her were not bad streets, but full of complex life. However, as she became more prosperous, she moved to an old house in a small Essex town, Tolleshunt d’Arcy, although she kept a pied-à-terre on Great Russell Street. her two houses gave her two areas of focus: east anglia/essex and london. all the books are set in one or the other. In an interesting short story, a “lady of the manor” has a well-organized life that includes a monthly weekend in London. her family doesn’t ask what she’s doing there; but she, in fact, meets a lover. Allingham did no such thing, but when her character walks into her little apartment, arranged entirely without reference to her or anyone else’s interests or convenience, she becomes, in a fundamental sense, a different person. The story implies that even if Allingham’s affair was with London in general and not with anyone in particular, her two lives were far apart in her mind.
He is unusual among detective novelists for having a real understanding of the way the country works. country life and city life are intricately textured in completely different ways; she understands a lot about both of them. I lived in the English countryside for a long time, and when I had to deal with many of the kinds of old men that Allingham describes in books like the mysterious mile, I was often reminded, during tortuous negotiations, of Amanda’s philosophical advice regarding questioning a man. old man. compatriot – “not only will you not learn anything, but all your rabbits will die.” Allingham could see that “getting the redneck” was often a deliberate strategy employed by tough and cunning people to force negotiations on their own turf, and by no means an indication of stupidity.
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I doubt anyone would read Margery Allingham for detection, as the plots are mostly fantastical to the point of campness. his most interesting individual twist on the genre was ditching detection altogether and writing what I consider to be a “convergence” story. that is, you, the reader, know both the criminal and the detective from the beginning. therefore, the suspense related to the discovery is left completely aside, and the interest is transferred to questions about the psychology of the villain and how, or if, the detectives reach him (the tiger in the smoke and hiding my eyes are the classic examples). I imitated this structure in London Bridges, a loving homage to Allingham thrillers in which all the “detection” there is takes place on page 274 over the course of about two minutes.
Each of his books has its own atmosphere. not only is it clearly set in a particular place or places, but each one is a very accurate reflection of the mood of the year it was written, which, again, is unusual for a crime novelist of her time. interwar detective stories tended toward nostalgia and some confusion about dates that would make it easier to reissue the books. Allingham’s early books are like that, but the war made a big difference to her. she wrote a memoir of life in tolleshunt in the first year of the war (the heart of oak), and this seems to have drawn her attention to the speed at which her attitudes and mentalities were changing, a subject that came to fascinate her. /p>
thus, the histories written during and after the war respond precisely to change. i am writing a biography of a man of allingham’s generation, the painter edward burra, and as i was reading about social history, moving forward in time through his life, it occurred to me that his sharply observant evocation of textures and concerns specific to the present moment would be very helpful, precisely because I was not intentionally writing a commentary on the times. this turned out to be absolutely the case. Although his work is fantastic, it is rooted in observing the differences between the formative experiences of one generation and the next.
she must have been one of the first writers to see the alienating potential of tower blocks, even when the concrete was still setting in the first wave of post-war urbanism. “It’s not exactly like a street,” says a policeman in the porcelain governess, gazing down a corridor of tower blocks. “A lot can happen without the neighbors knowing about it.” equally, she was the first mass-market British writer to involve computers in a plot, as far back as 1952 (a hollerith, in fact, the forerunner of true computer punch cards) in the tiger in the smoke
all the books include a murder and its resolution, and most of them also have a love story. The former is a requirement of the genre, the latter is an optional extra that allows Allingham to maintain the light-hearted tone that she generally prefers. but if one looks at the deeper currents of her work, a theme that comes up repeatedly is how individuals adapt to the changing world and, above all, to their own displacement by their natural successors. this is the central theme of more work for the undertaker, for example. much of his work protests the refusal of one generation to acknowledge the legitimate needs of another; or see how they can live together with mutual respect. heavy topics for light fiction; but handled with such ease and grace that it is only in retrospect, if at all, that one realizes that the book has engaged in some very serious thinking.
from the forensic language of margery allingham
“My dear friend,” said gee-gee pityingly. “We can’t have a fight. After all, Johnny is who he is, isn’t he? I know it’s fashionable to pretend to ignore that, but one really doesn’t, right? No, we can’t definitely have Johnny involved in anything.” disgusting. that’s absurd, johnny is sans reproach. i’ll talk some sense into this guy, but he’s not going to be a cakewalk. the doctors are completely out of control these days. i’ll have to focus on him if you don’t mind. I’ll meet you downstairs, okay?”
The last comment wasn’t a question and he opened the door again. she spoke once more before disappearing.
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“thanks for the coffee. very kind of you. I’m afraid there isn’t much help in the kitchen.”
“you’d be surprised,” said mr. campion briefly, and went downstairs.
He picked up his hat on the way and quietly walked out of the house. he didn’t know anyone, and he was thankful. darkness swallowed him as he headed southwest with determination. having come to a decision he was relieved; this was the end of them all, as far as he was concerned. there was just one more thing that needed to be done and then he would wash his hands.
As he strode through the misty darkness, he tried to put the whole thing out of his mind, but it wasn’t that easy. after long years of practice, he had developed a routine and now, despite his inclinations, his brain persisted in calmly continuing the investigation. every bit of information she had gathered in the twenty-four hours spun before his inner eye, trying to slip into the pattern that was already forming. The discovery that gold automatically assumed that Johnny was privileged beyond all normal limits of civilized behavior was one of them. it had been strange coming from him and had reminded mr campion of an incident from his own youth when the nursemaid of the little friend who had just pushed him into the round pond, had turned to her own avenging nanna and said in exactly the same words : same tone of startled protest:
“but he’s a duke.”
At the age of four and a quarter, Mr. Campion had seen the excuse wrong and now he did, with the added benefit of knowing that ninety-nine percent of the world agreed with him. however, he found it interesting to note that the remaining one percent still existed and was at large. another little puzzle piece slid into place.
· margery allingham’s coroner’s pidgin and flowers for the judge is reissued by vintage on september 7th, the margery allingham omnibus on october 5th. To order a copy for £6.99 (or £12.99 for the omnibus) with free UK p&p, call the Guardian Book Service on 0870 836 0875 or visit theguardian.com/bookshop
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