#allingham_margery

British novelist (1890-1976)

Ingenuity is the essence of Christie's detective stories. She confined herself largely to two detectives, pompous Poirot and elderly, inquisitive Miss Marple. Nowadays, as well as her plots, it is the period detail of her books which fascinates: her English villages, spa hotels, 1930s cruise-ships and above all country houses are caught (as Poirot might put it) like ze flies in ze amber. She chronicles a vanished presecond-world-war, upper-middle-class Britain with an accuracy which is enhanced rather than diminished by the staginess of her characters and plots.

MURDER AT THE VICARAGE  (1930) This typical Miss Marple story is set in a picture-postcard English village riven by gossip and inhabited by as unlikely a collection of eccentrics as even Christie ever threw together. Everyone could be guilty of murder, and Miss Marple's investigation is so gently persistent, so self-effacingly officious, that one trembles in case she ends up as victim rather than as sleuth.

MURDER IN MESOPOTAMIA  (1936) A nurse goes to look after the neurotic wife of an archaelogist on a dig, and is thrown into the middleof intriguem suspicion, ranorous insult and finally, inevitably, murder. At the end of it all Poirot applies his 'little grey cells' to unearthing means, motive and opportunity as painstankingly as an archaelogist trowelling treasure.

Among the best-known of Christie's 83 detective novels are The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Ten Little Niggers/Ten Little Indians/Then There Were None, Murder on the Orient Express and The Crooked House. She also wrote stage plays (including The Mousetrap), an excellent second-world-war espionage thriller (N or M), and six romantic novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott.

READ ON

To Murder at the Vicarage :A Murder is Announced

Cyril Hare, An Ill Wind Margery Allingham, The Crime at Black Dudley Ngaio Marsh, Overture to Death Gladys Mitchell, Come Away, Death Dorothy Simpson, The Night She Died Dorothy Simpson, Wake the Dead Patricia Wentworth, Miss Silver Investigates

(painters; fakers; patrons, art-enthusiasts)

Margery Allingham, Death of a Ghost

Michael Ayrton, The Mazemaker

Joyce Cary, The Horse's Mouth

Tracy Chevalier, Girl with a Pearl Earring

Mary Flanagan, Trust

Michael Frayn, Headlong

Lesley Glaister , Sheer Blue Bliss

Alan Hollinghurst, The Folding Star

Wyndham Lewis, Tarr

Shena Mackay , The Artist’s Widow

W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

Arturo Pérez-Reverte, he Flanders Panel

British novelist (1905-1966)

Allingham wrote ‘crime fiction’ only in the sense that each of her books contains the step-by-step solution of a crime, and that their hero, Albert Campion, is an amateur detective whose amiable manner conceals laser intelligence and ironclad moral integrity. But instead of confining Campion within the boundaries of the detective-story genre, Allingham put him in whatever kind of novel she felt like writing. Some of her books (More Work for the Undertaker; The Beckoning Lady) are wild, Wodehousian farce; others (Sweet Danger; Traitor’s Purse) are Buchanish, Amblerish thrillers.

FLOWERS FOR THE JUDGE  (1936) Strange things are happening at the old-established publishing firm of Barnabas and Company. First the junior partner turns a street-corner in Streatham and vanishes into thin air, then there is skullduggery over a priceless but obscene manuscript, and soon afterwards the firm's stuffy senior partner is murdered and Mr Campion has three intertwined mysteries on his hands.

THE TIGER IN THE SMOKE  (1952) Allingham's best book is set in an atmospheric, cobble-stones-and-alleyways London filled with low-life characters as vivid as any in Dickens. Like all Allingham’s novels, it is not a conventional whodunit, although it contains plenty of mysteries that demand solutions. Jack Havoc, the ‘tiger’ of the title, escapes from jail and the hunt for this violent convict takes place in an eerie and fog-enshrouded London that Allingham brilliantly evokes. Campion and other characters familiar from Allingham’s work loom in and out of the fog as the action moves inexorably towards a violent conclusion.

Allingham’s other Campion books include Coroner’s Pidgin, Police at the Funeral, Hide My Eyes, Look to the Lady and the short-story collections Mr Campion and Others and Take Two at Bedtime. After Allingham’s death, her husband P. Youngman Carter wrote two further Campion novels, one of which, Mr Campion’s Farthing, is up to his wife’s most sparkling standard.

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Death of a Ghost (set in London’s eccentric art community and involving – what else? – forged paintings)

Hide My Eyes.

Edmund Crispin, The Case of the Gilded Fly Michael Innes, The Daffodil Affair H.R.F. Keating, A Rush on the Ultimate P.D. James, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman P.D. James, A Taste for Death Joan Smith, Masculine Ending is a tongue-in-cheek whodunnit starring a feminist sleuth