Authors Electric

  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 t...

Credit: RAF Valentines Day 1943 The plane home from Hamburg thrummed steadily through the night, down the western side of Germany to Amsterdam, then across the narrow sea to Essex. I think a returning WW2 bomber would have crossed higher, spent more time over the sea than the land. Thousands of ordinary people fly to and from Germany every day. Our countries are allied against larger aggressors to the east and west. It’s not necessary to wake these hurtful memories of things that happened before most of us were born.  Except … when I had asked my brother earlier that day whether he’d like to live in Hamburg, he thought not. ‘Too many horizontal bricks,’ he said. We laughed at him of course. ‘That’s the way bricks are laid!’ but when he pointed across the street to one of so many postwar, Lego-like, redbrick rectangular blocks we understood what he meant. The pervasive evidence of rebuilding. My brother normally lives in former East Berlin, a city hung over by its own c20th history....

James Allingham at his desk He worked out the cost of the printing, the office and the distribution and soon became fascinated. He saw the venture in its clearest and most material light. To him it appeared as a method of selling low-grade bulk paper at forty times its value with the added advantage that the more of it one sold, the higher the profit became. He saw too that it was the ink on the paper that did the selling, so, the only real problem was which words to print with the ink. (Dance of the Years 1943) Margery &Herbert Margery Allingham was looking back, fictionally, to her grandfather’s decision to found a penny paper, The Christian Globe, 150 years ago. James Allingham had been apprenticed as a compositor. When his father died, he seized his opportunity to invest his legacy share in a slim weekly newspaper. Literacy was beginning to boom in the 1870s as the educational initiatives following the 1867 Electoral Reform Act began leavening the number of readers within the...

Margery Allingham on Mersea Island Very few people these days have read Margery Allingham’s first novel, Blackkerchief Dick , published in 1923 when she was aged 19. They are probably wise, though for the uber-Allingham nerd, there are definitely points of interest. But for anybody who writes fiction, its genesis is surely fascinating. The plot and characters for this first novel were, apparently, ‘given’ via a series of eight séances, initially undertaken by the Allingham family as a summer holiday pastime on Mersea Island in August 1921. From the first moment that I read through the slightly tired looking leaves of paper with transcription in capital letters and blunt pencil, that survive in Margery’s archive, I’ve felt convinced that here lies treasure for the literary psychologist.   The word séance probably makes this sound more occult than was intended. At its most basic level ‘playing the glass’ is a game.   A wineglass or tumbler is placed on a table and encircled ...

The Watchtower from the Saltings  (Photo Tom Barr)  How to connect a 1940s naval watchtower on the Tollesbury marshes, a brilliant Scottish knitwear designer and my all-time favourite novelist?   The investigation led me along the single-track lanes south-east from Tollesbury, heading towards the end of the old railway line to Tollesbury Pier. I began to get goosebumps as I remembered coming here before. Once on a long walk with my dog, when I was never quite sure where we were trespassing but was determined to explore anyway.  That was when I first saw the six-sided building, stark and guarded against the weather. Then I saw it again in my imagination: ‘It’s a t-tower,’ said David. Xanthe loved the way he said it with a shiver of excitement in his voice. ‘It’s in the m-middle of a f-field and it looks right down the r-river.’ ‘And when it was wartime the Navy built it so they could keep a lookout against invaders,’ added Kieran. ‘Then p-zow they’d press...

  Apologies for contacting you when we have never met or been in touch before. I am trying to trace a Julia Jones who lived in Writtle as a child, and wondered if this might be you? I run a removals and clearance company and have this week been clearing the property of a book publisher called Arne Soova. Within the contents, I came across a portrait sketch by Brenda Moore and on the back of the frame is written “Julia Jones as a child…[something beginning with N] Hall, Writtle, Essex”. Apologies if this is not you but if it is, I am just really interested in the story behind the portrait and would love to know more. I can also send a picture of the portrait if you wished. This unexpected email came from Alexa MacDonald and her husband Johnney, whose removals and clearance company is in Newmarket, Suffolk.   When a house is almost empty, Alexa explained that they often find some remaining letters, photos, small items which seem likely to have a personal significance to someo...

Perhaps this is a lockdown experience or perhaps it’s a reversion to earlier ways of living and working. We, like so many other families, find ourselves working from home, each in our separate spaces. Bertie’s in the attic, laying-out books with Indesign; Francis somewhere downstairs trying to find the right angle of physical endurance for solid hours of Private Eye deadlines and me … well, to be honest, I’m most characteristically surrounded by WW2 naval memoirs, copies of Lloyd’s Registers and overflowing scribbled papers … in bed. Together with my faithful laptop, miraculously fact-checking and emailing, tweeting and posting. Thus Golden Duck (UK) ltd keeps busy. One of my favourite Margery Allingham novels Flowers for the Judge (1936) tells the story of Barnabas and company, publishers since 1810 at the Sign of the Golden Quiver. It’s a perfect setting for a classic murder mystery: an enclosed location, limited number of suspects, distinctive atmosphere, ra...