The Mystery Box – a prison or a refuge?

 

Margery Allingham was a May baby, born into this gorgeous month of fresh grass and leaves, when the air is scented by honeysuckle or wild garlic; peonies, giant poppies and alliums are bursting balls of colour; the annual miracles of lilac and wisteria cascade in elegant fragrancies. As a lonely child, moving from suburban London to Layer Breton, Essex, she learned to love the unkempt garden of a decaying country rectory for its wildness and sense of possibility. 

As a successful adult, living in Essex once again, she and her husband gave parties in their garden, employed a full-time gardener and exhibited prize roses in the local horticultural shows. That was never the heart of its meaning. Margery’s garden remained a sanctuary, a place where she could achieve ‘a momentary clarity of mind, which will give me a definite lead at least to the next step in whatever I may be about.’ (Oaken Heart p115).

When she experienced breakdown in mid-April 1955 she was seen wandering the garden, barefoot, talking to herself. Perhaps it would have been better if she’d been encouraged to remain there, walking for as long as she liked, or digging, or weeding, until she rfound that ‘momentary clarity of mind’ and regained her equilibrium. Instead she was taken to a nursing home in Chiswick and given four sessions of ECT (electro-convulsive therapy). She was 51 then, the men in her life assumed she must be menopausal. ‘Boys decide change of life, mental trouble,’ she wrote later. (AMA p300) The women read the situation differently but were not heard. ‘She was crying out for help,’ said her friend and housekeeper Christina Carter, ‘and that was what they did to her.’ (AMA p301) In fact she had thyroid deficiency, unacknowledged breast cancer and a unique and complex mind (as we all have).

Margery’s intelligence had been trained since childhood – mainly by herself but also perhaps by her father and the general family ambience: ‘I have been trained to remark since I was seven and must always be watching and noting and putting experience into communicable form.’  (OH p245) Her emotions and beliefs were something other – though she watched them too.

When I was researching Margery’s life, many years ago, I often worked in a small room next door to the house which she had loved as an adult. There was a window looking down into the garden and I sometimes saw a woman walking there. I didn’t know her name and never asked it. In my memory she has an inexpressive, matt complexion, as if thickly daubed with powder, a slash of lipstick and a cigarette. Her hair is faded blonde on white, backcombed and wiry. Her dressing gown is also white. She isn’t gardening. She isn’t Margery. I don’t think she was a ghost. She’s just an unknown person, deeply unhappy, seeking solitude and sanctuary. I worry about her sometimes.

In the later years of her life, Margery became more willing to write about her writing. The Mysterious Mr Campion, a first omnibus edition published by Chatto & Windus in 1963, included an essay ‘Mystery Writer in the Box’ in which she reflected on her own career and on the popularity of the ‘Mystery’. Initially, for her, this was the ‘simple action story’, narratives in which to escape and have fun. In the aftermath of WW1 this seemed important. She had tried a single ‘serious’ novel (Green Corn) and found it beyond her.  Post war anger, grief, bitterness and disillusion demanded a novelist’s response. She recognised and respected these aspects of the national mood, yet, somehow, they failed to chime with her naturally buoyant and optimistic nature. ‘One either finds life entertaining or one does not and what happens in one’s life has amazingly little effect upon the basic outlook,’ she wrote in the later essay.

Her failure was painful. She knew she had disappointed her father, who she loved and admired; she had felt exposed and humiliated by the publishing process, being interviewed by the daily press ‘without having anything to say to it.’ This left deep scars. She continued to earn her living by writing but cherished the hope of writing seriously ‘for fun’. The growing popularity of detective stories in the later 1920s seemed to offer her opportunity and anonymity. ‘No one cared what the mystery writer thought, as long as he did her job and told his story.’ 

The form was fixed, rigidly so.

The Mystery remains box-shaped, at once a prison and a refuge. Its four walls are, roughly, a Killing, a Mystery, an Enquiry and a Conclusion with an element of Satisfaction in it.

The mystery box offered her both opportunity and sanctuary. She could stuff it full of jokes and stories, observe eccentricity, experiment with ideas just as long as she obeyed the rules and continued to entertain. She could cut her tales to fit, or she could push against the sides, remembering that ‘the only difference between a real character and a paper one was life, which changes all the time.’ As Margery’s life experiences changed, so did her stories – but they were always delivered to the reader securely packaged. She wondered whether her readers were also seeking sanctuary, ‘refugees in a period of world emotional chaos’. During World War 2 she asked herself once again whether it was acceptable to write escapist fiction at such a time and came to various different conclusions. Her single attempt to write a literary novel was another failure. She needed the constraining walls however idiosyncratically she experimented within them.

Entrants in the annual Margery Allingham short mystery competition are similarly obliged to pack their unpublished offerings in the box.  It’s a short story competition sponsored by the Margery Allingham Society and administered by the Crime Writers Association. The judging for this year’s award has now been completed and a shortlist of six stories announced.

In alphabetical order they are:

St Peter Investigates by Nicholas Avery – a well-constructed and funny story, set at the gates of Heaven and in a Dagenham ‘manor’ – a word Margery Allingham’s detective Charlie Luke would have relished.

Spider by EL Faull – a creepily imaginative story where crime can be a hidden daily reality which only a poem can truly express. An evocative conclusion which is more meaningful that the simple unmasking of a murderer.

Only the Truth by Sara Grant – a story where the menopause looms large, distorting both public and private perceptions. Margery described the mystery story protagonist as a modern version of the Knight Errant, the rescuer, battling to reveal the truth, as this brave detective constable does so effectively.

The Wind Blows Where It Wishes by Michael Hill – another truth seeker’s story, a version of the locked room mystery but set in the windswept wilderness of Scottish mountains and moorland.  A Golden Age construction with a human shift.

The Charlatan by Alyssa Mackay – particularly well-paced and amusing story with a strong narrative voice. It plays on the border between belief and fakery, an area which intrigued Margery from her first published novel to her last.

The Tenth Night by Ajit Nagpal – an exotic setting, far removed from the conventional ‘Cluedo’ world, beautifully written and paced with an intriguing ambiguity, and some acute observation of the behaviour of people in crowds.

All these 21^st century writers have accepted the central format -- the Killing, the Mystery, the Enquiry and the Conclusion with an Element of Satisfaction -- and have made it their own.  In the 12 years of this short story competition there have always been over 100 entries and this year was better still. What might Margery say about this continuing willingness to remain within the Mystery Box? ‘This is as odd, if one considers it, as if there were an enduring passion for the triolet in an era of free verse.’ She presents the Mystery as a type of folk literature with an ethical message at its heart.

The main message is still the same, simple and on the side of the angels. ‘It is not good to die. Any violent death is the concern of the community.’ Minor messages vary, as do the writers, and some of these may have been hampered by the formality of the medium. But for the rest, and I count myself among these, the Mystery is an art form whose discipline has been beneficial and which has always kept us free in our very unimportance. We have the privilege of Court Fools.

The story comments here are mine alone. The winner will be announced May 30^th 2026, in York, at the launch of the CWA’s Annual Crime-Reading Month.  

Devotees of Allingham's 'plumpuddings' -- the early novels in which she describes her self as stuffing all manner of jokes and anecdotes into the mystery box, may enjoy the description of Mystery Mile in Christina Hardyment's new book Novel Crime Scenes published 16.4.2026