Margery Allingham
Encyclopedia
Margery Louise Allingham (20 May 1904 – 30 June 1966) was an English crime writer, best remembered for her detective stories featuring gentleman sleuth Albert Campion
.
, London in 1904 to a family immersed in literature. Her father, Herbert John Allingham, and her mother Emily Jane were both writers - he was editor of the Christian Globe and The New London Journal (to which Margery later contributed articles and Sexton Blake
stories), before becoming a successful pulp fiction
writer, while her mother was a contributor of stories to women's magazines. An aunt, Maud Hughes, also ran a magazine.
Soon after Margery's birth, the family left London for Essex
, living in an old house in Layer Breton, a village near Colchester
. She went to a local school and then to the Perse School for Girls
in Cambridge
, all the while writing stories and plays; she earned her first fee at the age of eight, for a story printed in her aunt's magazine.
Returning to London in 1920, she attended the Regent Street Polytechnic
studying drama and speech-training, curing a stammer she had suffered since childhood; it was at this time that she first met her future husband, Philip Youngman Carter. In 1927, she married Carter, who collaborated with her and designed the jackets for many of her books. They lived on the edge of the Essex Marshes in Tolleshunt D'Arcy
, near Maldon
.
, though later in life this was debunked by her husband. Nevertheless, Allingham continued to include occult
themes in many novels. Blackkerchief Dick was well received, but was not a financial success. She also wrote several plays in this period, and attempted to write a serious novel, but finding her themes clashed with her natural light-heartedness, she decided instead to try the mystery
genre.
Her first work of detective fiction
was a serialized story published by the Daily Express
in 1927. Entitled The White Cottage Mystery, it contained atypical themes for a woman writer of the era.
. This introduced Albert Campion
, albeit originally as a minor character. He returned in Mystery Mile
, thanks in part to pressure from her American publishers, much taken with the character.
By now, with three novels behind her, Allingham's skills were improving, and with a strong central character and format to work from, she began to produce a series of popular Campion novels. At first she had to continue writing short stories and journalism for magazines such as The Strand Magazine, but as her Campion saga went on, her following, and her sales, grew steadily. Campion proved so successful that Allingham made him the centrepiece of another 17 novels and over 20 short stories, continuing into the 1960s.
Campion is a mysterious, upper-class character, working under an assumed name, who floats between the upper echelons of the nobility and government on one hand and the shady world of the criminal class in the United Kingdom on the other, often accompanied by his scurrilous ex-burglar servant Lugg
. During the course of his career he is sometimes detective, sometimes adventurer. He falls in love, gets married and has a child, and as time goes by he grows in wisdom and matures emotionally.
As Allingham's powers developed, the style and format of the books moved on; while the early novels are light-hearted whodunnits, The Tiger in the Smoke
(1952) is more character study than crime novel, focusing on serial killer Jack Havoc and leaving Campion a minor character no more prominent than his wife Amanda and his police associates.
Allingham suffered from breast cancer
and died at Severalls Hospital, Colchester
, England, on 30 June 1966.
Her final Campion novel, A Cargo of Eagles, was completed by her husband as her final request and was published in 1968. Other compilations of her work, both with and without Albert Campion, continued to be released until the 1970s.
In 1941, she published a non fiction work entitled The Oaken Heart which described her experiences in Essex when an invasion from Germany was expected and actively being planned against, potentially placing the civilian population of Essex in the front line. It is of particular interest because, the outcome of the Second World War at that point still being uncertain, it is an articulate and genuinely contemporaneous account of a moment of particular national peril. It is extensively relied upon, for example, by the historian John Lukacs
in his study of Five Days in London, May 1940.
, began a reissue programme for Margery Allingham in 2004: so far they have reissued Sweet Danger, Mystery Mile, The Tiger in the Smoke, The Case of the Late Pig
, Traitor's Purse
, The Fashion in Shrouds, Flowers for the Judge, Coroner's Pidgin, The Beckoning Lady, Police at the Funeral, More Work for the Undertaker, China Governess, Hide My Eyes (December 2007), Cargo of Eagles and Mind Readers (September 2008). A film version of Tiger in the Smoke was made in 1956; a highly popular series of Campion adaptations was shown by the BBC
in 1989-90, starring Peter Davison
as Campion and Brian Glover
as Lugg (available on DVD).
Several books have been written about Margery Allingham and her work, including:
Albert Campion
Albert Campion is a fictional character in a series of detective novels and short stories by Margery Allingham. He first appeared as a supporting character in The Crime at Black Dudley , an adventure story involving a ring of criminals, and would go on to feature in another 17 novels and over 20...
.
Childhood and schooling
Margery Allingham was born in EalingEaling
Ealing is a suburban area of west London, England and the administrative centre of the London Borough of Ealing. It is located west of Charing Cross and around from the City of London. It is one of the major metropolitan centres identified in the London Plan. It was historically a rural village...
, London in 1904 to a family immersed in literature. Her father, Herbert John Allingham, and her mother Emily Jane were both writers - he was editor of the Christian Globe and The New London Journal (to which Margery later contributed articles and Sexton Blake
Sexton Blake
Sexton Blake is a fictional detective who appeared in many British comic strips and novels throughout the 20th century. He was described by Professor Jeffrey Richards on the BBC in The Radio Detectives in 2003 as "the poor man's Sherlock Holmes"...
stories), before becoming a successful pulp fiction
Pulp magazine
Pulp magazines , also collectively known as pulp fiction, refers to inexpensive fiction magazines published from 1896 through the 1950s. The typical pulp magazine was seven inches wide by ten inches high, half an inch thick, and 128 pages long...
writer, while her mother was a contributor of stories to women's magazines. An aunt, Maud Hughes, also ran a magazine.
Soon after Margery's birth, the family left London for Essex
Essex
Essex is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in the East region of England, and one of the home counties. It is located to the northeast of Greater London. It borders with Cambridgeshire and Suffolk to the north, Hertfordshire to the west, Kent to the South and London to the south west...
, living in an old house in Layer Breton, a village near Colchester
Colchester
Colchester is an historic town and the largest settlement within the borough of Colchester in Essex, England.At the time of the census in 2001, it had a population of 104,390. However, the population is rapidly increasing, and has been named as one of Britain's fastest growing towns. As the...
. She went to a local school and then to the Perse School for Girls
Perse School for Girls
The Stephen Perse Foundation is an independent, fee-paying day school situated near the centre of Cambridge, England. The Foundation is made up of four schools: The Stephen Perse Pre-Prep School, for boys and girls aged 3-7, Perse Girls Junior School,for girls aged 7-11, Perse Girls Senior School,...
in Cambridge
Cambridge
The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...
, all the while writing stories and plays; she earned her first fee at the age of eight, for a story printed in her aunt's magazine.
Returning to London in 1920, she attended the Regent Street Polytechnic
University of Westminster
The University of Westminster is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom. Its origins go back to the foundation of the Royal Polytechnic Institution in 1838, and it was awarded university status in 1992.The university's headquarters and original campus are based on Regent...
studying drama and speech-training, curing a stammer she had suffered since childhood; it was at this time that she first met her future husband, Philip Youngman Carter. In 1927, she married Carter, who collaborated with her and designed the jackets for many of her books. They lived on the edge of the Essex Marshes in Tolleshunt D'Arcy
Tolleshunt D'Arcy
Tolleshunt D'Arcy is a village and civil parish in the county of Essex in the East of England.The Parish has a Parish council, and lies within the area of Maldon District Council....
, near Maldon
Maldon, Essex
Maldon is a town on the Blackwater estuary in Essex, England. It is the seat of the Maldon district and starting point of the Chelmer and Blackwater Navigation.Maldon is twinned with the Dutch town of Cuijk...
.
Early writings
Her first novel, Blackkerchief Dick, was published in 1923 when she was 19. It was allegedly based on a story she heard during a séanceSéance
A séance is an attempt to communicate with spirits. The word "séance" comes from the French word for "seat," "session" or "sitting," from the Old French "seoir," "to sit." In French, the word's meaning is quite general: one may, for example, speak of "une séance de cinéma"...
, though later in life this was debunked by her husband. Nevertheless, Allingham continued to include occult
Occult
The word occult comes from the Latin word occultus , referring to "knowledge of the hidden". In the medical sense it is used to refer to a structure or process that is hidden, e.g...
themes in many novels. Blackkerchief Dick was well received, but was not a financial success. She also wrote several plays in this period, and attempted to write a serious novel, but finding her themes clashed with her natural light-heartedness, she decided instead to try the mystery
Mystery fiction
Mystery fiction is a loosely-defined term.1.It is often used as a synonym for detective fiction or crime fiction— in other words a novel or short story in which a detective investigates and solves a crime mystery. Sometimes mystery books are nonfiction...
genre.
Her first work of detective fiction
Detective fiction
Detective fiction is a sub-genre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator , either professional or amateur, investigates a crime, often murder.-In ancient literature:...
was a serialized story published by the Daily Express
Daily Express
The Daily Express switched from broadsheet to tabloid in 1977 and was bought by the construction company Trafalgar House in the same year. Its publishing company, Beaverbrook Newspapers, was renamed Express Newspapers...
in 1927. Entitled The White Cottage Mystery, it contained atypical themes for a woman writer of the era.
Campion and success
Her breakthrough occurred in 1929 with the publication of The Crime at Black DudleyThe Crime at Black Dudley
The Crime at Black Dudley, also known in the United States as The Black Dudley Murder, is a crime novel by Margery Allingham, first published in 1929, in the United Kingdom by Jarrolds, London and in the United States by Doubleday Doran, New York...
. This introduced Albert Campion
Albert Campion
Albert Campion is a fictional character in a series of detective novels and short stories by Margery Allingham. He first appeared as a supporting character in The Crime at Black Dudley , an adventure story involving a ring of criminals, and would go on to feature in another 17 novels and over 20...
, albeit originally as a minor character. He returned in Mystery Mile
Mystery Mile
Mystery Mile is a crime novel by Margery Allingham, first published in 1930, in the United Kingdom by Jarrolds Publishing, London, and in the United States by Doubleday, Doran, New York...
, thanks in part to pressure from her American publishers, much taken with the character.
By now, with three novels behind her, Allingham's skills were improving, and with a strong central character and format to work from, she began to produce a series of popular Campion novels. At first she had to continue writing short stories and journalism for magazines such as The Strand Magazine, but as her Campion saga went on, her following, and her sales, grew steadily. Campion proved so successful that Allingham made him the centrepiece of another 17 novels and over 20 short stories, continuing into the 1960s.
Campion is a mysterious, upper-class character, working under an assumed name, who floats between the upper echelons of the nobility and government on one hand and the shady world of the criminal class in the United Kingdom on the other, often accompanied by his scurrilous ex-burglar servant Lugg
Magersfontein Lugg
Magersfontein Lugg is a fictional character in the Albert Campion novels, written by Margery Allingham. Servant and factotum to Mr Campion, Lugg is a former burglar, with a gruff manner, who hinders Campion socially as much as he helps.- Appearances :...
. During the course of his career he is sometimes detective, sometimes adventurer. He falls in love, gets married and has a child, and as time goes by he grows in wisdom and matures emotionally.
As Allingham's powers developed, the style and format of the books moved on; while the early novels are light-hearted whodunnits, The Tiger in the Smoke
The Tiger in the Smoke
The Tiger in the Smoke is a crime novel by Margery Allingham, first published in 1952, in the United Kingdom by Chatto & Windus, London and in the United States by Doubleday Doran, New York. It is the fourteenth novel in the Albert Campion series....
(1952) is more character study than crime novel, focusing on serial killer Jack Havoc and leaving Campion a minor character no more prominent than his wife Amanda and his police associates.
Allingham suffered from breast cancer
Breast cancer
Breast cancer is cancer originating from breast tissue, most commonly from the inner lining of milk ducts or the lobules that supply the ducts with milk. Cancers originating from ducts are known as ductal carcinomas; those originating from lobules are known as lobular carcinomas...
and died at Severalls Hospital, Colchester
Colchester
Colchester is an historic town and the largest settlement within the borough of Colchester in Essex, England.At the time of the census in 2001, it had a population of 104,390. However, the population is rapidly increasing, and has been named as one of Britain's fastest growing towns. As the...
, England, on 30 June 1966.
Her final Campion novel, A Cargo of Eagles, was completed by her husband as her final request and was published in 1968. Other compilations of her work, both with and without Albert Campion, continued to be released until the 1970s.
In 1941, she published a non fiction work entitled The Oaken Heart which described her experiences in Essex when an invasion from Germany was expected and actively being planned against, potentially placing the civilian population of Essex in the front line. It is of particular interest because, the outcome of the Second World War at that point still being uncertain, it is an articulate and genuinely contemporaneous account of a moment of particular national peril. It is extensively relied upon, for example, by the historian John Lukacs
John Lukacs
John Adalbert Lukacs is a Hungarian-born American historian who has written more than thirty books, including Five Days in London, May 1940 and A New Republic...
in his study of Five Days in London, May 1940.
Legacy
Although much of her work is largely forgotten today, the Campion stories and other mystery work remain popular, frequently reissued by publishers and vigorously traded second-hand. Vintage, the literary paperback publishers of Random HouseRandom House
Random House, Inc. is the largest general-interest trade book publisher in the world. It has been owned since 1998 by the German private media corporation Bertelsmann and has become the umbrella brand for Bertelsmann book publishing. Random House also has a movie production arm, Random House Films,...
, began a reissue programme for Margery Allingham in 2004: so far they have reissued Sweet Danger, Mystery Mile, The Tiger in the Smoke, The Case of the Late Pig
The Case of the Late Pig
The Case of the Late Pig is a crime novel by Margery Allingham, first published 1937, by Hodder & Stoughton. It is the eighth novel featuring the mysterious Albert Campion and his butler/valet/bodyguard Magersfontein Lugg.-Plot summary:...
, Traitor's Purse
Traitor's Purse
Traitor's Purse is a crime novel written by Margery Allingham. It was originally published in 1941 in the United Kingdom by Heinemann, London and in the United States by Doubleday, New York as The Sabotage Murder Mystery...
, The Fashion in Shrouds, Flowers for the Judge, Coroner's Pidgin, The Beckoning Lady, Police at the Funeral, More Work for the Undertaker, China Governess, Hide My Eyes (December 2007), Cargo of Eagles and Mind Readers (September 2008). A film version of Tiger in the Smoke was made in 1956; a highly popular series of Campion adaptations was shown by the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
in 1989-90, starring Peter Davison
Peter Davison
Peter Davison is a British actor, best known for his roles as Tristan Farnon in the television version of James Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small and the fifth incarnation of the Doctor in Doctor Who, which he played from 1982 to 1984.-Early life:Davison was born Peter Moffett in Streatham,...
as Campion and Brian Glover
Brian Glover
Brian Glover was an English character actor, writer and wrestler. Glover was a professional wrestler, teacher, and finally a film, television and stage actor. He once said, "You play to your strengths in this game. My strength is as a bald-headed, rough-looking Yorkshireman".-Early life:Glover was...
as Lugg (available on DVD).
Several books have been written about Margery Allingham and her work, including:
- Margery Allingham, 100 Years of a Great Mystery Writer edited by Marianne van Hoeven (2003)
- Margery Allingham: A Biography by Julia ThorogoodJulia Jones (writer)-External links:** article on Arthur Ransome Wiki website...
(1991); revised as The Adventures of Margery Allingham as by Julia JonesJulia Jones (writer)-External links:** article on Arthur Ransome Wiki website...
(2009). This is the standard biography. - Ink in Her Blood: The Life and Crime Fiction of Margery Allingham by Richard Martin (1988)
- Campion's Career: A Study of the Novels of Margery Allingham by B.A. Pike (1987)
External links
- The Margery Allingham Society
- A brief biography and analysis from ClassicCrimeFiction.com
- A biographical sketch from the Margery Allingham Archive
- archive.org).
- http://www.reallylikethisbook.com contains a 2011 podcast on Allingham's novel The Beckoning Lady