#margery allingham

For one thing, and unusually for the genre, he changes quite a lot over time. He's a very different person in his twenties (mild-mannered but semi-criminal and willing to undertake everyone else's adventures for a price) to in his forties (quieter, having undertaken some murder mysteries that actually distressed him quite a bit and also dropped the affectations of his twenties, and less easy to overlook as a fool), to in his sixties (married and settled, still doing his very ambiguous job as not-exactly-sleuth, not-quite-criminologist, but much less connected to the criminal underworld than he used to be, surprisingly happy).

For another he likes people. Which people? Just about all of them. He has been known to hang out with coppers, criminals, aristocrats, actors, romani and restauranteurs, and that's just off the top of my head. He doesn't necessarily approve of some of those... he doesn't like being an aristocrat and doesn't use his own title (or his real name for that matter), and also doesn't see why people should get to do what they like just because they happen to be a duke, but he likes several aristocrats personally. He is not always on the side of the police exactly, although he does work with them, but he likes several policemen. I think he mostly finds the police indelicate, the innocent tend to get trampled in pursuit of the guilty and they're not careful about what information they dig up can do to people. There are some crimes he doesn't like and he insists he himself does "nothing sordid" during his criminal career. He refuses to work with a blackmailer but seems to bear said blackmailer no ill-will (and does go to him for information about where a kidnapped ally might be held later).

Related to this he is quite fishy. He certainly has a moral code, but it is only vaguely related to obeying the law. He will catch murderers, mostly in order to stop them murdering even more people, and he can be paid to go after criminals, but otherwise he has nothing against criminals and is kind of a criminal himself - at least when he's younger. The first time we meet him (in the one book where he's not the protagonist) he spends most of it preventing people from being killed by a gang but what he's actually doing there is running messages for a different gang. And then in the next book he goes out of his way to get himself hired to prevent the gang he was running messages for from murdering someone. (And then in the third book he is technically hired to prevent a theft by killing the would-be-thief, but he cannot actually bring himself to kill her even when presented with the opportunity on a silver platter after she very nearly killed him.)

As a general rule he tends to approach a mystery not as a matter of crime and punishment but as a situation that needs to be untangled with the minimum of harm to the people involved.

Here's what I plan on reading and watching in vague order the rest of the summer and into the fall and winter.

If I had a quarter for every time a novel came out this year that featured the four queens of crime helping to solve a mystery (Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham), I would have two quarters.

The Beckoning Lady by Margery Allingham

A while back, the always-sharp @thesarahshay sent me an ask that caught me up on something that I'd carelessly written in some tags- I said that Agatha Christie was good at writing romance into her detective fiction, without really elaborating. I then spent multiple paragraphs attempting to elaborate, I'm not sure with how much success. Essentially, and you can click above to see for yourself, my thesis was that while Sayers was a much better literary stylist (and certainly better at writing romance) than Christie, when writing a detective novel, her seams show; Christie had a natural talent for knowing exactly what belongs in a detective story and creating and fitting all the right pieces together that create a seamless detective story, including motivations drawn by romance (though I think the actual romances are among the weaker elements- still MUCH better than those written by most of her peers, for the record).

I'd had trouble putting into words what I wanted to say (there was a convoluted metaphor about Barbies and Lego in there), and I'm not sure I was too convincing; but turns out that the person who said what I wanted to say the best was, in fact the great DLS herself.

There's a fabulous book that I 100% recommend called Taking Detective Stories Seriously, which is a compilation of about two years' worth of detective story reviews that Sayers wrote. I hadn't heard of most of the authors, and even when I had heard of the authors I'd rarely read the books, but it didn't matter, frankly. She's just such a great writer, so thoughtful and incisive and passionate about both the genre and good craftsmanship (not to mention good English), that everything she has to say including on novels that haven't been in print since the 30s is worth reading. She has generally great taste, though she has a much higher opinion of Margery Allingham than I do and doesn't like Ellery Queen's The Siamese Twin Mystery as much as I'd thought she might (though the fact that a character in it insulted Unnatural Death may not have helped lol); but she also likes, to pick two very different writers who I too enjoy, HC Bailey and Mignon G Eberhart, and so she clearly has a good eye. (It's also entertaining to see her slowly force herself to admit that she likes Perry Mason...)

BUT ANYWAY.

She has three reviews of Agatha Christie books in the volume: Murder on the Orient Express, Why Didn't They Ask Evans, and Three Act Tragedy. She reviews all of them very positively, but it's her review of Three Act Tragedy (in my opinion, funnily enough, the weakest of the three) that she really gets to the core of Christie's genius. And it's actually fitting that it's for a book of hers that's on the more meh end of the scale- because it just shows how even meh Christie has an element of genius that other authors have to work hard for even in their best works.

She says:

Some time ago this column contained the statement that Hercule Poirot was "one of the few real detectives." It was a well-sounding phrase, and I have no quarrel with it, except that I am not quite clear what it meant. What I meant to write and what I thought I had written and what I now propose to write clearly with no mistake about it was and is this: Hercule Poirot is one of the few detectives with real charm. Plenty of authors assure us that their detectives are charming, but that is quite another thing. I don't know that Mrs Christie has ever said a word about the matter. She merely puts Poirot there, with all his little oddities and weaknesses, and there he is- a really charming person. And it is true, too, that he is "real," in the sense that we never stop to enquire whether his words and actions are suited to his character; they are his character, and we accept them as we accept the words and actions of any living person because they are a part of himself. Le style c'est l'homme. Indeed, when Mrs Christie is writing at the top of her form, as she is in Three Act Tragedy, all her characters have this reality. She does not postulate a character- retired actor, West End mannequin, family retainer- and put into its mouth sentiments appropriate to its station in life. She shows us character and behavior all of a piece. However surprising or enigmatic the behavior, we believe that everything took place just as she says it did, because we believe in the reality of the people. Poirot is charming, not because anybody says so, but because is is, and all her other people exist for us in the same objective manner. This is the great gift that distinguishes the novelist from the manufacturer of plots. Mrs Christie has given us an excellent plot, a clever mystery, and an exciting story, but her chief strength lies in this power to compel belief in these characters. [emphasis mine]

Sayers then proceeds to compare another author (or rather authors, the husband and wife pair GDH and M Cole) to Christie in this regard, moving on to another review. But in these three paragraphs she has, I think, said it better than anyone- that Christie's skill is in her naturalness, and how that naturalness compels us to believe in and immerse ourselves in her world. She is effortless and seamless.

To be clear, Sayers praises a lot of people in this book, and a lot of people's writing; but mostly she is praising their skill and ability to create what they have created. Here, she isn't quite praising that- she's praising the fact that the final product is so good that you can't even see the craftsmanship behind it, and that's, I think, what separates Christie from her peers. It's a power, and not one that can be broken down by a critic. She just has it.

I've said before that I don't think Sayers had this as a mystery writer, and I think she'd probably be the first to agree with that assessment; she certainly had a seemingly effortless skill as a prose writer (as these reviews show), but as a novelist she took construction seriously and wanted us to know this. That said, another person who I don't think has this, who I mention because he's someone who a lot of people compare Christie to (often negatively), is John Dickson Carr.

I've seen plenty of people say that Carr is a more sophisticated version of Christie, not just in mystery construction but in writing style, and equally prolific, creative, and versatile. I don't agree with this on most counts, but I think, honestly, that Carr is fine- but you can see the seams easily. He might have been prolific but his formulae are visible and his writing required intentionality on his part. By which I mean- Carr when he's trying to be funny is generally hilarious. Carr when he's trying to be scary is generally spine-tingling. But Carr when he's just trying to get to the next good bit is dull and mechanical. He needs to be paying attention and making an effort in order to be good, and we notice him doing this. Christie never has this problem; even when the actual stuff she's writing isn't high quality, she's never dull. Everything feels purposeful and organic, somehow.