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...

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...