Margery Allingham

Margery Allingham (1904-1966), British crime novelist, creator of the fictional detective Albert Campion. She was born in Ealing, London, into a family with a long literary tradition (her father was the author and editor Herbert Allingham), and educated at the Perse School, Cambridge, and the Regent Street Polytechnic School of Speech and Drama. She completed her first novel at the age of 17, the pirate adventure Blackkerchief Dick: A Tale of Mersea Island (1923), and served her apprenticeship adapting film stories for the magazine The Girl’s Cinema.

She established herself as a writer of detective stories with her third published novel, The Crime at Black Dudley (1929), in which she introduced the mild-mannered aristocratic sleuth Albert Campion. Campion, like Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, would age alongside his creator. In all he appeared in some 20 novels, joined by the shady ex-burglar Magersfontein Lugg as his manservant, and a host of vividly described villains and eccentrics.

Allingham’s early novels, such as Mystery Mile (1930) and Look to the Lady (1931), tended to be entertaining genre pieces, but as her style matured she acquired a reputation as a more serious writer skilled at reconciling the demands of thriller and realist fiction. Her most interesting work includes the atmospheric and ingenious Dancers in Mourning (1937), the intricately plotted More Work for the Undertaker (1949), and The Tiger in the Smoke (1952), which aspires to a more profound analysis of the nature of evil. She also wrote under the pseudonym Maxwell March.