Margery Allingham Research Articles

The Golden Age of Detective Fiction

This paper tries to study the golden age of detective fiction ranging from 1920-1939. The famous detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple – the evergreen creation of Agatha Christie. Besides, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L.Sayers, Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham belong to this era. This paper would try to critically examine the features of detective fiction during this era and the rise of the female authors. The influences it received from the predecessors and also try to analyze the upcoming trends in detective fiction.

Reading and Mapping Fiction: Spatialising the Literary Text, by Sally Bushell

Reviewed by: Reading and Mapping Fiction: Spatialising the Literary Text by Sally Bushell Ann C. Colley (bio) Reading and Mapping Fiction: Spatialising the Literary Text, by Sally Bushell; pp. xvi + 335. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, £75.00, $99.99. If any reader has consulted maps in the map room of the British Library or even visited Stanfords (established 1853), the variety inherent in the cartographic genre is evident and intriguing. Recently I examined late-eighteenth-century maps of the Lake District and was enthralled by the multiplicity of ways in which map makers had chosen to represent their subject. The genre’s complexity has now been extended for me by Sally Bushell’s Reading and Mapping Fiction: Spatialising the Literary Text, a study that not only [End Page 715] explores the relationship between the literary map (as opposed to actual maps) and the text to which it corresponds but also engages the larger questions concerning the extent to which we map as we read and how to represent this reality. This book takes the reader on a comprehensive journey that explores the unique relationship between the literary map and the text in which it appears. Maintaining that “an experience of literary space is not the same as the mapping of the real world,” Bushell demonstrates just how fictional maps are not, as some mistakenly maintain, a mere illustration (91). She opens her study by contextualizing (almost exhaustively) her work within a review of ideas about the nature of mapping. She then offers a historical sense of the interdisciplinary relationships among literature, geography, and cartography from the twelfth to the nineteenth century. When constructing this frame, Bushell assembles voices of commentators that, although informative, almost overwhelm the opening chapter. I was impressed by Bushell’s grasp of this context yet wished to hear the guidance of her own voice. But that is to come, particularly when she addresses the question of how mapping is crucial to the interpretive part of reading fiction. Bushell raises interesting points throughout. She explores the possibility that a map cannot necessarily be trusted: it can manipulate a reader as well as the characters within the fiction. Moreover, her point that the literary map becomes a means by which fiction attempts to escape its own fictionality is suggestive. Furthermore, Bushell shows how a fictitious map is duplicitous: it faces outward to the reader and, at the same time, is present for the characters who are negotiating their sense of place. In addition, Bushell periodically returns to the paradox between the fixed, retrospective map and the sequential movement of a narrative. For those interested in Victorian fiction, Bushell devotes a significant part of the book to the integral function of literary maps within specific genres in the nineteenth century. In her words, these maps draw “attention to the fact that they are not intended to function in the same way as actual maps of the world” (91). To illustrate this experience, Bushell discusses the nature and use of fictional maps in such adventure and spy texts as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903), and John Buchan’s Prester John (1910). She demonstrates the ways in which the literary map is a dynamic part of, yet exterior to, the text. These characteristics and the importance of spatial orientation are also at work in the detective fiction of the 1920s and 1930s. In the novels of Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Edmund Crispin, and Agatha Christie, the mapping is really based upon what Bushell terms “a human geography” that charts the human network of the mystery (128). It appears to be trustworthy and map the crime scene, yet often misleads and preys upon the gullibility of the reader. In this way, the act of mapping counters the genre’s supposedly objective form. After discussing the function of the map in adventure, spy, and detective fiction, Bushell turns her attention to maps in children’s fiction. She explores the map-text relationship in such works as Arthur Ransome’s Lake District series and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit...

„Świat cały jest sceną…”. Szekspirowskie aluzje w „Hamlet, Revenge!” Michaela Innesa

While some of the golden age detective novels tend to rather concentrate on the social background or the psychology of the characters, thus utilizing the novel of manners conventions (Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, Martha Grimes), others focus on the criminal puzzle itself, presenting it as a challenge both to the fictional detective and to the reader. This is the case with Michael Innes’s novel, where the context of the murder is a performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, while quotations from this and other Shakespeare’s plays function as clues. The paper explores both the utilization of Shakespeare’s play as a code to decipher the puzzle, as well as the theatralization of the presented reality itself, turning — even as viewed from the internal perspective — into a stage on which a drama is played.

Houses asLieux de Mémoirein Margery Allingham’s Crime Fiction

This article discusses the house as a site of memory in the novels of Margery Allingham, where it embodies a tension between the past and the present that turns the domestic milieu into a place of horror. Stemming from Susan Rowland’s claim that Golden Age authors did not write ‘unproblematically conservative country house mysteries’ (43), this paper uses Svetlana Boym’s theory of restorative and reflective nostalgia and Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) to read Allingham’s novels, which critically observe the sustainment of a vision of the past after the Great War. In her work, country houses like the eponymous one in The Crime at Black Dudley (1929), are, despite their aristocratic grandeur, perfect scenes for murder. While the countryside is associated with a nostalgic innocence, it is also contaminated by the intrusion of the present, as in Sweet Danger (1933). Family secrets are also reasons for crime, as we see in Police at the Funeral (1931). Hide My Eyes (1958) relocates the nostalgic atmosphere to a suburban house converted into a museum of ‘curios’, which operates as an ironic allegory of a nation wrapped up in its own history.

Aristocracy Must Advertise: Repurposing the Nobility in Interwar British Fiction

AbstractIn the interwar years, authors Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham wrote popular detective fiction that explored possible roles for the aristocracy in an age of universal suffrage. Critics have seen these novels as nostalgic encomia for hierarchy and tradition. This article argues that they should be seen instead as part of a larger trend in interwar fiction that sought to make connections between aristocracy, national identity, and social cohesion. Far from celebrating an imagined idyllic past, these novels suggested possibilities for the continuing relevance of the nobility to the upholding of justice, and indeed, to the success of British democracy.

Beloved Old Age and What to Do About It: Margery Allingham’s The Relay Handed on to Julia Jones Jones Julia Beloved Old Age and What to Do About It: Margery Allingham’s The Relay Handed on to Julia Jones 192pp £10.99 Golden Duck 9781899262298 1899262296

This book offers the perspectives of two people caring for older family members: novelist Margery Allingham in the 1950s and her biographer Julia Jones, whose mother is in her nineties and currently living in supported housing.

Beloved Old Age and What to Do About It: Margery Allingham's The Relay Handed on to Julia Jones Beloved Old Age and What to Do About It: Margery Allingham's The Relay Handed on to Julia Jones 192pp £10.99 Golden Duck 9781899262298 1899262296 [Formula: see text

This book offers the perspectives of two people caring for older family members: novelist Margery Allingham in the 1950s and her biographer Julia Jones, whose mother is in her nineties and living in supported housing, today.

Look to the Ladies

22 WLT NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2016 crime & mystery WORLDLIT.ORG 23 T his summer the British Library held another of its highly successful Bodies from the Library days celebrating the Golden Age of crime fiction. We had papers on Josephine Tey, Ngaio Marsh, and Georgette Heyer (her crime, not her Regency, novels), all favorite writers of mine, plus papers on male detective novelists. The only one I’d heard of was G. K. Chesterton with his Father Brown stories. The following week in Waterstones, I saw a new set of Josephine Tey’s crime novels. I started thinking about the longevity of the female Golden Age crime novelists. Over the last twelve years, Vintage has republished most of Margery Allingham. Agatha Christie has never been out of print, nor has Dorothy L. Sayers. Why have the Golden Age female crime novelists survived to enjoy a renaissance , where the males have not? I was nudged toward an answer by Martin Edwards’s excellent book, The Golden Age of Murder, a study of the founding of the Detection Club in 1930 and its members during the period up to 1949. Created by Anthony Berkeley Cox, one of the leading detective novelists of the period, it provided a social network and support for crime writers he admired. Of the forty-one members elected between 1930 and 1949, there were twenty-nine men and twelve women. Dorothy L. Sayers was one of the founding members; so was Agatha Christie. Margery Allingham was elected in 1934. The detective novel rose to popularity in the 1920s, in a society with a passion for games and game playing, and detective novels of the period provided “puzzles.” Authors presented situations that seemed impossible , “locked-room mysteries” abounded, and readers pitted their wits against the author. One of the foremost proponents was John Dickson Carr, whose The Hollow Man (1935; US title: The Three Coffins) presents three puzzles in one story, all seemingly impossible, until Dr. Fell sweeps aside the illusions and trickery and presents the solution . It is perhaps the acme of the “puzzle” detective novel. American crime writer S. S. Van Dine wrote, “The detective story is a kind of intellectual game. It is more—it is a sporting event.” In 1928 he drew up a list of “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories .” In 1929 Ronald Knox, a founding member of the Detection Club, produced a somewhat shorter list. The rules were mainly founded on the “fair play” principle , such as insisting that the detective shared clues with the reader­ —and that the detective was not to have committed the murder. It was said to be an attempt to legitimize detective fiction as a respectable literary genre. Detective novelists played lip service to the “rules” and almost immediately proceeded to break them (see WLT, Nov. 2015, 16­ –18). Detective novels of the 1920s concentrated on the investigator assessing details of the crime and the “unbreakable” alibi of the prime suspect. Floor plans, clocks that were fast or slow, hidden passages, and secret rooms often featured. “How” the murder was committed was often more important than why or by whom. I began reading crime fiction at an early age. My mother would ask me to choose her reading matter from the local library. She liked detective novels, and eventually I started to read them myself. Mother liked Agatha Christie, but I am sorry to say that I found her stories simplistic. I returned to her after I started writing crime novels myself and was taken aback by the fluidity of her writing, her ability to set out story and characters in a way that seemed simple and entertaining but in fact concealed a fiendishly clever plot. The book that grabbed me was Gaudy Night (1935), by Dorothy L. Sayers. It’s the tale of a campaign of poison-pen letters and other disturbing events in an Oxford college. Unusually for a crime novel, murder is narrowly avoided. I was captivated by the relationship between Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane and the tensions in the college atmosphere. I began to read Sayers’s other books. Then I lit on Margery Allingham. I first read Look to the Lady...

Dorothy L. Sayers, the Great War, and Shell Shock

Dorothy L. Sayers, the Great War, and Shell Shock

British Culture at Mid-Century: Wartime Writing and Intermodernism

British Culture at Mid-Century:Wartime Writing and Intermodernism Patrick Bixby Bluemel, Kristin A. , ed. Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. 264pp. $95.00. Deer, Patrick . Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 320 pp. $125.00. Miller, Kristine . British Literature of the Blitz: Fighting the People's War. New York: Palgrave, 2009. 240 pp. $85.00. Mid-twentieth-century British culture has long been underappreciated and under-analyzed. Falling into the chronological and taxonomical gap between modernism and postmodernism, the writers of the 1930s and 40s have received only scant critical attention compared to the canonical figures of high modernism or the generation that appeared on the scene after the Second World War and the end of the British Empire. The three studies considered here participate in a broader effort to fill in the blank spaces of literary scholarship by turning our attention to a singular moment in British cultural history, when the creative energies of modernism were being rerouted into alternative modes of cultural production, especially those emerging in response to wartime experience. In this effort, the volumes join other significant recent studies, including Jed Esty's A Shrinking Island, Marina McKay's Modernism and World War II, and Bluemel's own George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics, to map the [End Page 258] central terrain of twentieth-century British cultural history in all its variety and complexity. Despite the emergence of an immensely powerful mass media and culture industry dedicated to unifying the British people around the war effort, the period witnessed the rise of other forms of expression that contested widely held notions about national identity and the nature of war. Together, the present studies vividly demonstrate that rather than presenting a lull in creative activity, the years of heightened political tension, global warfare, and imperial decline coincide with a remarkable cultural boom. It is not surprising, given the tumult of the war years, that each volume also gives ample attention to the historical forces that attended this cultural boom, viewing literature alongside propaganda filmmaking, sociological investigation, military strategy, war crimes prosecution, and a host of other contextual matters. In doing so, they cover a broad field of cultural production and open that field to further scholarly exploration, opposing the conventional critical wisdom that the war initiated a cultural decline that continued through the end of the 1940s. Kristine Miller's British Literature of the Blitz, for instance, sets out to challenge prevailing historical accounts of the so-called People's War, which have assumed that a coherent nationalist ideology united the British home front during the Nazi bombing campaign. In this revisionist project, Miller contributes to a new wave of historical scholarship that has begun to recognize the diversity of responses to the Blitz and the important influence of class relations and gender roles on those responses. She finds evidence of this diversity not only in literary representations of wartime experience, ranging from the innovative texts of Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Green to the genre fiction of Agatha Christie and Margery Allingham, but also in popular film and personal testimony. In fact, Miller concludes her study with an entire chapter on the Blitz-era cinema, addressing movies such as The Gentle Sex, Millions Like Us, and In Which We Serve, because their popularity demonstrated "the wartime British public's willingness to pay for films that were willing to question and experiment with the ideology of the People's War" (162). Throughout the study, the diaries and questionnaires of the Mass Observation project, gathered from thousands of British civilians beginning in the late thirties and now archived at the University of Sussex's Special Collections, prove an invaluable resource for this brand of cultural history, as indeed they do for each of the studies considered here. Miller's volume, in particular, makes ample use of the materials in order to demonstrate the range of responses to a radically new kind of civilian experience, commencing an important scholarly effort by giving a number of testimonies "the literary critical attention they deserve" (4). Another important resource for all three studies is the writing of...

British Literature of the Blitz: Fighting the People’s War (review)

Reviewed by: British Literature of the Blitz: Fighting the People’s War Michael Mirabile Kristine A. Miller. British Literature of the Blitz: Fighting the People’s War. London: Palgrave, 2009. vii + 216 pp. Kristine A. Miller’s British Literature of the Blitz: Fighting the People’s War offers the reader a fascinating look at a prominent but little understood chapter of European modernity: the British experience of the German Blitzkrieg during World War II. The exact focus of the study is the literary imagination’s engagement with raw traumatic shock and its attendant discursive constructs, like Churchill’s speeches and the pervasive People’s War rhetoric of national unity—whether the latter is interpreted as myth, ideology, or (most severely) propaganda. At times, on Miller’s account, cultural phenomena appear to have transformative and, at others, limited powers. With each exemplary case she cites, however, the analysis proves nuanced and expansive, addressing political and social implications of specific renderings of the People’s War. In closely evaluating the construction of the People’s War, Miller demonstrates how its significance lies not only in its response in the moment (in 1940, then again in 1944) to the Blitz but also in its persistent futurity. This forward-looking glance projected the social upheaval of the war years onto the subsequent decades. Did individuals believe, then, that the breakdown of gender and class distinctions prompted by bombing raids could provide the model for postwar equity? Miller’s response to this question is complex, as it entails placing political progressivism under that same People’s War rubric and thus seeing its mythical and ideological aspects as well, insofar as it will later fall short of realization in the welfare state. Indeed, if there is a keyword for British Literature of the Blitz it is “conflictual”: contesting sweeping narratives of the period (like Angus Calder’s 1969 study) and drawing heavily on Mass-Observation reports and personal testimonies, Miller upholds a portrait of an ambivalent nation. Civilians appear both trustful and suspicious of unifying discourses, hopeful and despairing about the war’s outcome. Many, to be sure, [End Page 645] held out hope for “permanent social change,” as it was outlined in the British government’s famous 1942 Beveridge Report. But others did not, or opposed it. In short, the People’s War is a “far less coherent idea” than most historians suggest (8). So too does ambivalence shape the book’s particular critical interventions. The popularity of films such as The Gentle Sex (1941) and the Noël Coward and David Lean collaboration In Which We Serve (1942) is set against “the reality of audience diversity” (154), a spectrum of possible reactions that differ across gender, class, and regional lines (and within those categories). (The examination, moreover, of film spectatorship itself, it is implied, demands a distinct methodology when theaters doubled as bomb shelters.) Likewise though on an individual, authorial level, Elizabeth Bowen’s wartime writings, culminating with The Heat of the Day (1949), complicate our notion of British wartime experience: they “resolutely refuse,” for instance, “ to generalize about the impact of the People’s War on British women” (33). The range of examples in British Literature of the Blitz is very impressive. Miller details the defining social tensions in Bowen’s, Rosamond Lehmann’s, and Henry Green’s fictions, yet also takes popular forms seriously, from the cinema to Agatha Christie’s and Margery Allingham’s detective novels, and then to Graham Greene’s “entertainments” or spy novels. Selected tales of detection and espionage bear directly on Miller’s thesis because they illustrate how novelists adapt to prevailing conditions. Effectively challenging, more exactly, traditional views of genre fiction “as an imaginary escape” (116) and a vehicle for the promotion of “conservative social norms” (117), she sees it being torn apart at this time by its internal contradictions and, in the process, adapting to that change. “These popular detective and spy novels experiment with generic conventions,” she concludes, “in order to market to a more diverse book-buying public the ideological conflicts central to the People’s War itself” (116). From this reoriented perspective popular icons of intellectual mastery, like Christie’s Hercule Poirot...

A drop of water from a stagnant pool? Inter-war detective fiction and the rural community

Detective fiction has been little considered by historians of the British inter-war village. This is despite the phenomenal publishing and sales in this literary genre. Agatha Christie is the bestselling writer of books of all time, and millions of people world-wide have learnt about English villages by reading her. This article discusses why inter-war fiction is instructive to social historians. It concentrates on the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of this fiction: notably the authors Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and G. K. Chesterton. The subject is approached through a number of themes, which address the genre, county house settings, the nature and morphology of the detected village, representations of villagers and the poor, the literary detectives (notably Miss Marple and Lord Peter Wimsey) and their relation to village life, the local role of gossip, depictions of the clergy, the fictional uses of material culture, senses of the past, the detection of ‘evil’ and issues of inter-war village renewal. A binding strand throughout is how the English village community is handled and interpreted in this fiction. The article argues that the detective genre is important and highly revealing to social and rural historians, and deserves extended analysis.

"A fine, sturdy piece of work [...]" Margery Allingham's Book Reviews for Time & Tide 1938-1944

"A fine, sturdy piece of work [...]" Margery Allingham's Book Reviews for Time & Tide 1938-1944

Margery Allingham's Gothic: Genre as Cultural Criticism

Margery Allingham's Gothic: Genre as Cultural Criticism

Contextualizing Magic and Witchcraft in the Novels of Margery Allingham: The Examples of Sweet Danger and Look to the Lady

Contextualizing Magic and Witchcraft in the Novels of Margery Allingham: The Examples of Sweet Danger and Look to the Lady

‘Dad's Back’: Mapping Masculinities, Moralities and the Law in the Novels of Margery Allingham

Crime fiction was, in its ‘Golden Age’ form, a new product of the interwar middlebrow. It was a particular and very popular way in which conservative-modern problematics about the domestic and about human emotional relationships but also about criminality and the law were talked through. This article examines the novels of Margery Allingham as an exemplar of this genre with reference to her own professional and gender identity as well as the broader cultural context. Crime fiction was one of several kinds of crime (particularly murder) stories, both fictional and ‘real life’, which circulated between the official discourses of the law and middle-class culture. This discussion explores Allingham's treatment of masculinities and of sexuality. It argues that narrative techniques that used the Gothic problematized the interrelationships of morality, modernity and history, and also inflected the pleasures of leisure reading with wider ‘middlebrow’ concerns about the gendered status of the modern citizen and more diffuse cultures of punishment and social responsibility.

From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British women writers in detective and crime fiction

This work considers, seriously, the hugely popular and influential works of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L.Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, P.D. James and Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine. Providing studies of 42 key novels, it introduces these authors for students and the general reader within the contexts of their lives, and critical debates on gender, colonialism, psychoanalysis, the Gothic, and feminism. It includes interviews with P.D. James and Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine. [From the Publisher]

75. Ink in Her Blood. The Life and Crime Fiction of Margery Allingham

75. Ink in Her Blood. The Life and Crime Fiction of Margery Allingham

Places for Mysteries

ABLED Victorian mansions, attractively proportioned Georgian houses, picturesque villages, London's chic West End, Soho's labyrinth of streets, narrow and winding rural roads and lanes, cliffed coasts, the British railway network, landscape changes wrought by the encroachments of developers, the engineered environment of the Fens-these are only a few of characteristics of places that a reader may encounter in British detective-mystery fiction. Although at first thought such fiction may not seem the place to look for the use of geography, mystery writing is an abundant source of literary geography. One may ask why geography is used, what its role is, and why geographers have ignored mystery fiction in their studies of literary landscapes. The last question is the easiest to answer. The study of literary landscapes or of the use of geography in fiction writing has for the most part concentrated on serious literature and has left to comparative neglect writing that the arbiters of literary standards have decreed to be popular entertainment or escapist reading. Although the status of detective-mystery fiction is a matter of dispute, only rarely are examples of the genre categorized as a higher form of literature.' Nevertheless, the fact that a vast reading public is exposed to a host of geographical information from the detective-mystery genre makes it worthy of analysis for its geographical components. To answer the questions of why geography is used and what its role is in the genre, I shall turn to the writings of two women who have been among the most popular of British fiction writers since the 1920's.2 At a time when activities of women in creative and artistic endeavors are being stressed, the choice of the works of female authors here highlights the unique contribution of the sex to British detective-mystery fiction. The writers surveyed here are Dame Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. They have been selected because of their familiarity to American readers and because of the quality of their novels, although aficionados of the genre may object to the exclusion of favorites such as Margery Allingham, Josephine Tey, Ngaio Marsh, Ruth Rendell, Elizabeth Lemarchand, or P. D. James. Dame Agatha is the most widely read of these writers. She enjoyed a long and prolific career that began in 1920, and posthumous volumes have been published since her death in I976.3 Dorothy Sayers, in contrast, had a relatively short career as a writer of detective fiction, but she created a character who continues to captivate readers and to attract followers, as the recently televised versions of her novels attest.4