Margery Allingham

• Born: May 20, 1904
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: June 30, 1966
• Place of death: Colchester, Essex, England

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; espionage; police procedural; thriller; cozy

Principal Series: Albert Campion, 1929-1969

Contribution

Along with Ngaio Marsh, Nicholas Blake, and Michael Innes, Margery Allingham was one of those writers of the 1930’s who created detectives who were fallible human beings, not omniscient logicians in the Sherlock Holmes tradition. Her mild-mannered, seemingly foolish aristocrat, Albert Campion, can miss clues or become emotionally entangled with unavailable or unsuitable women. Yet, though his judgment may err, his instincts demonstrate the best qualities of his class. Although Allingham is noted for her careful craftsmanship, for her light-hearted comedy, for her psychological validity, and for such innovations as the gang leader with an inherited position and the inclusion of male homosexuals among her characters, she is most often remembered for her realistic, often-satirical depiction of English society and for the haunting vision of evil that dominates her later novels.

Biography

Margery Louise Allingham was born on May 20, 1904, the daughter of Herbert John Allingham, an editor and journalist, and Emily Jane Hughes, her father’s first cousin, who also became a journalist. By the time of her birth, the family lived in Essex, where every weekend they entertained a number of other journalists. Although the young Allingham had two siblings, she spent many of her childhood hours alone, often writing. At seven, Allingham published a story in the Christian Globe, a publication of which her grandfather was editor. That year she went away to the first of two boarding schools; she left the second, the Perse School for Girls in Cambridge, when she was fifteen.

Finally, Allingham enrolled in the Regent Street Polytechnic in London as a drama student, but her first novel, Blackkerchief Dick: A Tale of Mersea Island (1923), an adventure story set in Essex, had already been accepted for publication, and when her friend Philip “Pip” Youngman Carter convinced her that her talents were more suited to writing than to acting, she left school to work on another novel. In 1927 she married Youngman Carter, who had become a successful commercial artist.

With the publication of her first mystery novel, The White Cottage Mystery, in 1928, Allingham settled into her career. In The Crime at Black Dudley (1929), she introduced Albert Campion, the amateur detective who was to appear in all the mystery novels that followed.

In 1929, Allingham and her husband moved to Essex; in 1934, they purchased their own home, D’Arcy House, expecting to live and work quietly in the little village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy. World War II soon broke out, however, and with Essex an obvious invasion target, Allingham became active in civil defense, while her husband joined the army. Her autobiographical book The Oaken Heart (1941) describes the fear and the resolution of Britons such as herself during the first months of the war. In 1944, Allingham returned to her mysteries. She and her husband made periodic visits to their flat in London but lived in D’Arcy House for the rest of their lives. Between 1929, when she wrote the first Campion mystery, and her early death of cancer on June 30, 1966, Allingham worked steadily, averaging almost a volume a year, primarily novels but also novellas and collections of short stories. Before her husband’s death in 1970, he completed Cargo of Eagles (1968) and wrote two additional Campion novels.

Analysis

After her pedestrian story of police investigation, The White Cottage Mystery, which she later removed from her list of works, Margery Allingham hit on a character who would dominate her novels and the imaginations of her readers for half a century. He was Albert Campion, the pale, scholarly, seemingly ineffectual aristocrat whom she introduced in The Crime at Black Dudley. As Allingham herself commented, the changes in Campion’s character that were evident over the years reflected changes in the author herself, as she matured and as she was molded by the dramatic events of the times through which she lived.

When Allingham began to write her novels in the 1920’s, like many of her generation she had become disillusioned. Unable to perceive meaning in life, she decided to produce a kind of novel that did not demand underlying commitment from the writer or deep thought from the reader, a mystery story dedicated to amusement, written about a witty, bright group of upper-class people who passed their time with wordplay and pranks—and occasionally with murder. In Allingham’s first novels, Albert Campion is somewhat like P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster, pursuing one girl or another while he attempts to outwit an opponent. The fact that Campion’s opponent is a murderer is not particularly significant; he is an intellectual antagonist, not a representative of evil. Furthermore, most of the action itself is comic.

Look to the Lady

In Look to the Lady (1931), for example, a formidable country matron abandons her tweeds and pearls for the garb of a mystical priestess, presiding over the rites of the Gyrth Chalice. In her costume, she is hilarious, a target of satire; when she is found dead in the woods, she is of far less interest, and the solution of her murder is primarily an exercise of wit, rather than the pursuit of justice.

Death of a Ghost

With Death of a Ghost, in 1934, Allingham’s books become less lighthearted but more interesting. Her prose is less mannered and more elegant, her plots less dependent on action and more dependent on complex characterization, her situations and her settings chosen less for their comic potentiality and more for their satiric possibilities. Death of a Ghost is the first book in which Allingham examines her society, the first of several in which the world of her characters is an integral part of the plot. Before the murder takes place in Death of a Ghost, Allingham must create the world of art, complete with poseurs and hangers-on, just as later she will write of the world of publishing in Flowers for the Judge (1936), that of the theater in Dancers in Mourning (1937), and finally that of high fashion in The Fashion in Shrouds (1938).

Just as Allingham becomes more serious, so does Albert Campion, who abandons even the pretext of idiocy, becoming simply a self-effacing person whose modesty attracts confidences and whose kindness produces trust. In Sweet Danger he meets the seventeen-year-old mechanical genius Amanda Fitton. After she reappears in The Fashion in Shrouds, Campion’s destiny is more and more linked to that of Amanda. If she is good, anyone who threatens her must be evil. Thus, through love Campion becomes committed, and through the change in Campion his creator reflects the change in her own attitude.

Traitor’s Purse

With the rise of Adolf Hitler, it had become obvious that laughter alone was not a sufficient purpose for life. Even the more thoughtful social satire of Allingham’s last several books before Death of a Ghost was inadequate in the face of brutality and barbarism. Only courage and resolution would defeat such unmistakable evil, and those were the qualities that Allingham dramatized in her nonfictional book about her own coastal Essex village in the early days of the war; those were also the qualities that Albert Campion exhibited in the wartime espionage story Traitor’s Purse (1941). In that thriller, the forces of evil are dark, not laughable, and the traitorous megalomaniac who is willing to destroy Great Britain to seize power over it is too vicious, too threatening, to evoke satire. Like his country, Albert Campion must stand alone against the odds; with symbolic appropriateness, he has just awakened into bewilderment, aware only that civilization is doomed unless he can defeat its enemies before time runs out.

With Traitor’s Purse, Allingham abandoned the mystery form until the war was nearly won and she could bring Campion home in Coroner’s Pidgin. Although for the time being evil had been outwitted and outgunned, Allingham comments that she could never again ignore its existence. The theme of her later novels is the conflict between good and evil. Such works as The Tiger in the Smoke (1952) and Hide My Eyes (1958) are not based on the usual whodunit formula; early in those books, the criminal is identified, and the problem is not who he is but how he can be caught and punished.

From his first appearance, Campion has worn a mask. In the early, lighthearted comic works, his mask of mindlessness concealed his powers of deduction; in the satirical novels, his mask of detachment enabled him to observe without being observed; in the later works, as a trusted agent of his government, Campion must carefully conceal what he knows behind whatever mask is necessary in the conflict with evil. Clearly the change in Campion was more than mere maturation. As Allingham’s own vision of life changed, her view of the mystery story changed, and her detective Campion became a champion in the struggle against evil.

The China Governess

The qualities of Allingham’s later works are best illustrated in The China Governess (1962). The first words of the novel are uttered by a police officer: “It was called the wickedest street in London.” Thus, the conflict of good and evil, which is to constitute the action of the book, is introduced. Although the Turk Street Mile has been replaced by a huge housing project, the history of that street will threaten the happiness and the life of Timothy Kinnit. Kinnit, who has recently become engaged, wishes to know his real origins. He was a child of the war, a man who had appeared as a baby among a group of evacuees from Turk Street and was casually adopted by the kindly Eustace Kinnit.

As the novel progresses, past history becomes part of the present. It is in the new apartment house on the site of old Turk Street that a brutal act takes place, the killing of a decent old woman. Yet evil is not confined to Turk Street. During the war, it had followed the evacuees to the Kinnit house in Suffolk, where an East End girl callously abandoned the baby she had picked up so that she might be evacuated from London, a baby whose papers she later used to obtain money under false pretenses. The highly respectable Kinnit family has also not been immune from evil.

In the nineteenth century, a governess in the Kinnit family supposedly committed a famous murder and later killed herself. For one hundred years, the family has kept the secret that is exposed in The China Governess: that the murder was actually committed by a young Kinnit girl. At the end of the book, another murderess is unmasked, ironically another governess who is masquerading as a wealthy Kinnit relative and who is finally discovered when she attempts to murder Basil Toberman, a socially acceptable young man who has spitefully plotted to destroy Timothy Kinnit. Thus a typical Allingham plot emphasizes the pervasiveness of evil, which reaches from the past into the present and which is not limited to the criminal classes or to the slums of London but instead reaches into town houses and country estates, pervading every level of society.

The China Governess also illustrates Allingham’s effective descriptions. For example, when the malicious Basil Toberman appears, he is “a blue-chinned man in the thirties with wet eyes and a very full, dark-red mouth which suggested somehow that he was on the verge of tears.” Thus Allingham suggests the quality of bitter and unjustifiable self-pity that drives Toberman to evil. Later, an intruder who emerges from the slums is described in terms that suggest his similarly evil nature: “He was tall and phenomentally slender but bent now like a foetus . . . He appeared deeply and evenly dirty, his entire surface covered with that dull iridescence which old black cloth lying about in city gutters alone appears to achieve.”

Allingham’s mastery of style is also evident in her descriptions of setting. For example, on the first page of The China Governess, she writes with her usual originality of “The great fleece which is London, clotted and matted and black with time and smoke.” Thus metaphor and rhythm sustain the atmosphere of the novel. Similarly, when the heroine is approaching Timothy’s supposedly safe country home, the coming danger is suggested by Allingham’s description of “a pair of neglected iron gates leading into a park so thickly wooded with enormous elms as to be completely dark although their leaves were scarcely a green mist amid the massive branches.”

If evil were limited to the London slums, perhaps it could have been controlled by the police, admirably represented by the massive, intelligent Superintendent Charles Luke. When it draws in the mysterious past and penetrates the upper levels of society, however, Luke welcomes the aid of Albert Campion, who can move easily among people like the Kinnits. In the scene in which Campion is introduced, Allingham establishes his usefulness. Quietly, casually, Campion draws Toberman into an unintentional revelation of character. Because the heroine, who is eavesdropping, has already heard of Campion’s sensitivity and reliability, she is ready to turn to him for the help that he gives her, and although he is not omniscient, he sustains her, calms her excitable fiancé, and brilliantly exposes the forces of evil.

Because Allingham builds her scenes carefully, realistically describing each setting and gradually probing every major character, the novels of her maturity proceed at a leisurely pace, which may annoy readers who prefer the action of other mysteries. Allingham is not a superficial writer. Instead, because of her descriptive skill, her satiric gifts, her psychological insight, and her profound dominant theme, she is a memorable one.

Principal Series Characters:

• Albert Campion , an aristocrat, Cambridge University graduate, and amateur sleuth, begins the series as a flippant young man, but as the series progresses, he matures, marries Lady Amanda Fitton, and becomes a father. Thin, pale, well bred, and well tailored, he is the kind of man whom no one clearly remembers. Campion’s seeming vacuity masks his brilliant powers of observation and deduction. A considerate and honorable person, he is often referred to as like an uncle in whom everyone confides. Although his full name is never disclosed, Allingham indicates that Campion is the younger son of a duke.
• Amanda Fitton , later Lady Amanda Fitton, eventually becomes Campion’s wife. Amanda is first introduced in Sweet Danger (1933) as a teenage girl with mechanical aptitude. When she reappears several years later, Campion and the cheerful, daring young woman first pretend to be engaged. As their relationship develops, they proceed to a legitimate engagement and finally to marriage. When Albert returns from the war at the end of Coroner’s Pidgin (1945), Amanda introduces him to her wartime achievement, their three-year-old son Rupert, who continues to appear in later books and at the end of the series is a graduate student at Harvard University. Amanda becomes an aircraft designer, and even after marriage she continues to rise in her firm, finally becoming a company director.
• Magersfontein Lugg , Campion’s valet, is a former convicted cat burglar whose skills and contacts are now used for legal purposes. A bona fide snob, Lugg tries unsuccessfully to keep Campion out of criminal investigations and up to the level of his ducal forebears.

Bibliography

Gaskill, Rex W. “Margery Allingham.” In And Then There Were Nine . . . More Women of Mystery, edited by Jane S. Bakerman. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1985. Examines Allingham’s place in the canon of female mystery writers. Bibliographic references.

Krutch, Joseph Wood. “Only a Detective Story.” In The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Howard Haycraft. Reprint. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1992. Entry discussing Allingham’s works in a widely cited and reprinted collection of essays. Bibliographic references and index.

Malmgren, Carl D. Anatomy of Murder: Mystery, Detective, and Crime Fiction. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2001. Discusses Allingham’s The Tiger in the Smoke. Bibliographic references and index.

Martin, Richard. Ink in Her Blood: The Life and Crime Fiction of Margery Allingham. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1988. Study alternates between biographical chapters and chapters of criticism analyzing the works Allingham produced during the period of her life chronicled in the previous chapter. Bibliography and index.

Pike, B. A. Campion’s Career: A Study of the Novels of Margery Allingham. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987. Focuses on the representation of Albert Campion and his relationship to other fictional sleuths.

Reynolds, Moira Davison. Women Authors of Detective Series: Twenty-one American and British Authors, 1900-2000. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2001. Examines the life and work of major female mystery writers, including Allingham.

Rowland, Susan. From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Allingham is the third of the three major figures discussed in this study, as her novels are compared with those of Christie and Rendell. Bibliographic references and index.

Thorogood, Julia. Margery Allingham: A Biography. London: Heinemann, 1991. Discusses the lives of both Allingham and her fictional creation, Campion. Bibliographic references and index.