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"The younger generation found themselves enriched in knowledge not only about old age but about themselves. They were able to look back with happiness and humour to an important part in their own evolution and found it good." Introduction to The Relay by Margery Allingham I’m picking up Margery Allingham’s The Relay at a time of need. There's Mum, there's John's Campaign. There's the shortfall of hours in every day. My deteriorating eyesight frightens me.I'm fed up with time spent bashing up and down the A12. I want to be with Francis, with my children and my grandchildren, who are growing up much-loved but scarcely seen. Peter Duck  will soon be seventy. I yearn to go sailing. Above all, I want to write -- elusive, unnecessary, adventure stories, not letters to Mum’s doctor or Quality Standards for the CQC.  I know this won’t last for ever. “It’s only a phase” – as people say about toddlers and teenagers. But as toddlers and teenagers will un...

Margery Allingham Albert Campion Margery Allingham (1904 – 1966) was one of the Golden Age “Queens of Crime” along with Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and Ngaio Marsh. Her series detective, Albert Campion, sometimes merges in people's minds with Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey – those languid, upper-class, vaguely Woosterian / Sir Percy Blakeney-ish types.  As far as I'm concerned this perception does Campion and his creator a disservice. I was lucky enough to write Allingham's biography ( The Adventures of Margery Allingham ) and remain constantly impressed by the way she used her detective to dramatise her personal preoccupations and record her observations of social change over four decades.  Bibliography of MA's short stories Allingham was always a developing and experimental writer. She stayed within the 'box' of the crime novel but never wrote the same book twice. Campion appears in nineteen full-length novels from The Crime at Blac...