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  Margery Allingham: An Introduction by J.E. Morpurgo

  In the decade before the Second World War, most often with Nicholas Blake and Michael Innes as companions, Margery Allingham was hailed as a leader in that new generation of writers which was revivifying British detective-fiction. Later, but not so very much later, she was elevated into even more resplendent company and settled, with Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, as one of the triumvirate of queens regnant which, since Conan Doyle dismissed Sherlock Holmes, has dominated the genre, until recent years without much trouble from potential usurpers.

  Homage in this kind is well-merited. Margery Allingham dealt in murder and the investigation of murder; she wove mystery as dark and as subtle as any contrived by even the most adroit of her contemporaries, predecessors or successors. Her Albert Campion ranks high in the distinguished regiment of hero-detectives and, whereas most of the seemingly obligatory detective's adjutants, among them Poirot's Hastings and Wimsey's Bunter, are little more than plastic mirrors set up to reflect their principal's brilliance and even the most renowned of them all, Dr Watson, merely the equivalent of a music-hall comic's straight man, on stage as an obtuse feed for Holmes's perspicacity, Campion's Magersfontein Lugg is a character in his own right, an original, memorable and worthy of election to the Noble Guild of Cockney Servitors whose Perpetual Master is Sam Weller. Even so, categorization inhibits appreciation and the well-meant tribute, a cliche with critics, blurb-writers and readers, which links Margery Allingham almost inextricably with the most eminent and most successful practitioners of detective-fiction has tended both to misplace Margery Allingham's purpose and to undervalue her achievement.

  Several of her novels and many of her short stories scarcely qualify for the classification, some not at all. Throughout her writing-life above all else a professional, Margery Allingham tried her professional hand at all manner of fictional forms. She wrote romances, jolly little tales of rural life, stories that are Gothic and some that are close to being metaphysical. Even in the Campion canon which takes up the greater part of the Allingham bibliography, crime and detection are often only incidentals. The neophyte novels are romps arranged by a young, inexperienced but patently talented choreographer, some of the later books are fantasies devised, as are so many of the most credible fantasies, by a fantasist with a gift for realism. Campion himself appears only as a bit-player in The Tiger in the Smoke, now by consensus acclaimed as Margery Allingham's finest work.

  Yet Margery Allingham did not despise the craft to which through much of her life she was indentured. If she did not litter her narratives with the detritus conventional to crime fiction, with false clues, fingerprints, bloodstains and knowing parentheses on police procedure, neither did she insist, as did Dorothy L. Sayers, that she wrote detective-fiction only to win for herself an audience for work more respectable, more intellectual and potentially more influential. Her business was with setting, with atmosphere and with character prime concerns for any true novelist. She used the framework of the detective-story as the scaffolding on which to construct her fictions and found it uniquely sturdy and convenient to her purpose because, as the total thrust of a crime-story is towards a denouement which must be designed by the storyteller before one line is written, it held her safe against the menace which hangs over all novelists, against the hazard of unsatisfactory resolution of plot.

  "In the losing battle that the plot fights with the characters," wrote E. M. Forster, "it often takes a cowardly revenge. Nearly all novels are feeble at the end. This is because the plot requires to be wound up."

  As her confidence grew so did her determination to be considered as a novelist among novelists. "I regard my books as novels," she wrote, "not just thrillers or detective-stories," and no plaudit that ever came her way gratified her as much as the recognition of intention fulfilled made explicit by that master of mystification, Torquemada, the compiler of The Observer's tortuous crossword-puzzles, when he wrote: "To Albert Campion has fallen the honor of being the first detective to feature in stories which are by any standard distinguished novels."

  Every novel and every short story in the Campion series is to itself entire yet all form part of one sequential narrative. Most of the great detectives and even more blatantly the detective-heroes whose exploits are chronicled week after week on television-screens are locked by their creators in time without chronology. They fall in love, they indulge in illicit affairs, they marry, they have children, they solve mysteries in such number as would fill the pages of a biography of Methuselah turned detective, they are wounded and close to death but they do not age. As Margery Allingham matured so did Albert Campion. As she was made more serious by experience so also with time was frivolousness excised from the character of Albert Campion. And, as the war was the harshest of all the experiences endured by Margery Allingham it was inevitably the war which was seminal to the character of Campion, a member of her generation. (Campion was, in fact, her senior but by only four years.)

  Margery Allingham lived in Tolleshunt D'Arcy through all the tense years between 1939 and 1945. Her husband and her sister went overseas with the forces but she, too, was in the front line, in a village terrifyingly close to an invasion coast and on the flight-path of German bombers on their way to attack London. She dispatched Campion to mysterious and dangerous missions in enemy-occupied territory and when at last he returned: "He had changed a little in the past three years. The sun had bleached his fair hair to whiteness. There were new lines in his over thin face and with their appearance some of his old misleading vacancy of expression had vanished."

  There were changes in Campion more subtle and more profound than these, the visible stigmata of war. He had not lost all his old ebullience, he was still capable of that "engaging astonishment which so often and so falsely had appeared in his pale eyes," but after the war indeed from its outbreak never again could he be despised, saved from damnation as a vacuous ninny only by his wit and his flair for resolving mysteries and from being dismissed as a caricature only by the cunning of his creator. He was married. He had a son. He moved still among eccentrics, criminals and well-disposed and efficient policemen, but his concern now was not so much with the solution of problems as with human fallibility and the battle between good and evil. In fact, Campion was no longer a private investigator in a crime-story but a central character in a novel who just happened to be by profession a detective.

  From her childhood it was inconceivable to Margery Allingham that she could follow any profession other than authorship. "I was born," she wrote, "into a family which sincerely believed that writing was the only reasonable way of passing one's life." Several other ancestors had made a livelihood with their pens, her father wrote, her mother wrote and the family home was forever filled with friends, "all scribbling away." There was nothing for it but that she emulate her seniors. "Master, Missus and three strangers all in their rooms writing down lies," snapped a disgusted housemaid on finding the infant Marge at work on a story, "and now you!" She was eight years old when she earned her first professional fee seven and sixpence for a fairy story and still in her teens when, in 1923, she published her first novel, Blackkerchief Dick, a rumbustious tale of adventures among pirates and smugglers set on the Essex Coast in a
region which she knew well from family holidays and which she was to make magical and her private domain in many later books. "The Wind Glass," the earliest of her short stories in this collection, was accepted for publication a year later. "The Beauty King," was written at about the same time and is another fine example of her innate capacity for writing the taut short stories required by newspaper editors but it did not see print for forty five years until 1969, three years after her death, when it appeared in the Daily Sketch.

  Already before the publication of Blackkerchief Dick Margery Allingham had established herself as a regular contributor of film-stories to her aunt's movie-magazine, Girls' Cinema.

  Marge met her future husband, Philip Young man Carter (Pip), when they were both seventeen years old and she already at work on Blackkerchief Dick. Many years later Pip recalled that first meeting as not a marked success. Marge wrote in her diary for that day "Not much of a chap," a very mild judgment on my condescending pomposity. For my part I discounted all this talk of a book as schoolgirl chatter. Soon, however, as her sister Joyce remembers, she amended her assessment. He seemed to her then the acme of elegant sophistication, a quality which already she was beginning to suspect was not her strongest suit. They were fellow-students at the Polytechnic in Regent Street and both of them enthusiasts for every kind of theater. They queued together for the gods and Marge became a frequent visitor to the garrets in a slum of odorous squalor hard by Seven Dials which Pip shared with a friend from his schooldays at Christ's Hospital, A. J. Gregory (Grog), like Pip an aspiring artist and accordingly, also like Pip, appropriately impoverished. "We talked very grandly and loosely about vice and living in sin, but did nothing about it. The previous lot had done all that and reaped a crop of trouble for it. Behind our facade of sophistication there was a barrier of Puritanism inspired by awful example." In 1927 Pip and Marge married and, still with Grog as companion, moved to slightly more salubrious accommodation in an attic-flat off High Holborn. In 1931 they rented a country cottage and in 1934, with loans from both families, they bought the beautiful old house in the center of Tolleshunt D'Arey, close to the Blackwater Estuary and the Essex marshlands, a locality which Marge had known since her childhood.

  D'Arey House was their home for the rest of their lives. Marge went to town seldom and then reluctantly; her sensitivity to the sights and sounds of London, her empathy with the Cockney character, her ear for the rhythms of Cockney speech and her knowledge of the geography of London were all garnered from experience in her first thirty years, from childhood days in Little Venice and from those few years as visitor and resident in a Bloomsbury poles apart from the Bloomsbury inhabited at almost the same time by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey and the rest of "the Bloomsbury Set." Essex close to the North Sea, its placid countryside, its villages, but sixty or seventy miles from London yet remote and lost in another world, and, most cherished of all, its wondrously mysterious marshlands, was for her a birthright which she nourished, enlarged and, throughout her writing-career in story after story, shared with her readers.

  Pip's attitude to country living, as to many of the circumstances of their life together, was ambivalent. He revelled in the role of lord of the manor and played it to perfection but he was gregarious as Marge was not but the crowd that pleased him most actors, artists, writers, publishers was essentially metropolitan and after the war, both from choice and professional necessity, he spent much of every week in town, either at his editor's office at The Tatler, at one of his clubs or in a flat appropriately for him above a publisher's office and next door to the British Museum.

  A man possessed of such remarkable versatility as in times less besotted with specialization than is the twentieth century must have won for Pip admiration he was artist, columnist, drama-critic, editor, authority on wine, travel-writer, soldier and, in his last years, novelist even so he neither resented nor condoned in others sympathy for the fact that his chance of public fame was, throughout his adult life, marred by the shadow of his much more eminent wife.

  Not the least of Pip's contributions to a partnership which was convoluted but loving and successful was that very quality of "elegant sophistication," which Marge had observed in him even when he was still in his teens. Pip despised all that was slipshod, in people or in art, and he turned on it the full fury of his sardonic wit. For any he suspected of disloyalty-to him the most heinous of sins he responded with bristling silence but to his friends and to all the Christ's Hospital sodality he was warm and energetically generous. For the rest he reserved his enthusiasm for all that was elegant, for clothes immaculately cut, for brilliant conversation, for good, clean writing, for fine painting, for cricket well played and beautiful women exquisitely dressed.

  It was: Marge much more than Pip who, despite never ending hard work, held their marriage almost steady against all the complexities of their life together and it was her influence much more than his which kept them strangely youthful to the end of their lives, but Pip's part in the furtherance of Marge's literary career was much more substantial than has ever been recognized except by their most intimate friends.

  Pip it was who suggested for Marge's hero his pseudonymic surname. (The Jesuit martyr, Edmund Campion, now canonized by the Congregation of Rites, is the most surprising alumnus of Christ's Hospital, a determinedly Protestant foundation.) But that was a trivial contribution. He was himself one of several models used by Marge for her portrait of Campion. But that was passive. He designed the wrappers for the hardcover editions of her books. But that was incidental. His professional expertise is evident in the many allusions to painting-techniques in her books and short stories, his tastes in all the references to great painters, but most seminal of all was Pip's role as adviser and critic, as something very close to being his wife's collaborator.

  In her Prefatory Note to the collection of Pip's chapters of autobiography, published in I 982 as All I Did Was This, Joyce Allingham describes Pip and Marge (and inevitably Grog) at work in the early days of their marriage "at a time when Marge was making some kind of a living by turning the stories of silent films into romantic novels for adolescent readers."

  Their delayed honeymoon in the South of France they earned for themselves when in one week and from Marge's dictation Pip took down in longhand all 70,000 words of one of these trivial romances. [In their High Holborn flat] she began her true career as a writer of mystery stories, dictating Mystery Mile and Look to the Lady to ... Grog whilst Pip worked at his drawing-board. If there was any word or incident in the book to which he took exception, Pip let it be known immediately, and at the top of his voice ... Because she had garnered some little reputation from her earlier work Marge published these two novels (as all after) under her maiden name. The construction and the writing were hers beyond doubt, but then (as throughout her career) she insisted that Pip had contributed two-thirds of the ideas and half the jokes. It pleased them both to comment that just as she had taken his name so also had he adopted hers.

  In later years, though often they worked side-by-side in the stables behind D'Arcy House, which they had converted into a studio, the technique of collusion was less primitive but its substance remained unchanged and it was no surprise to those who knew them best that when in 1966 Marge died, though Pip was in all other respects diminished, still he was able to take over full responsibility for keeping. If Campion alive. In the three years before Pip died he finished Cargo of Eagles and wrote Mr Campion's Farthing and Mr Campion's Falcon, all three novels in every way worthy additions to the canon.

  In those first years of their marriage Pip made no comparable contribution to their mutual solvency; until early in the war he joined the Army he earned only such picayune financial rewards as are customarily tossed to a young and unknown freelance artist and journalist and it was left to Marge to keep them from bankruptcy. This she could not achieve by what she called "writing with my right hand," even after the publication of her first detective-novel, The White Cottage Myste
ry, in 1927 and still after the first appearance of Campion in The Crime at Black Dudley had set the pattern for most of her "right-handed writing," she was forced to persist with "writing with my left hand," stories every week for a girls magazine, romantic serials for a publisher of pulps and articles for whosoever was prepared to commission them. Even after writing with my right hand had made her for editors and publishers one of the most sought-after authors in England and Pip was earning and spending handsomely, because their bank-balance teetered so often between the black and the red, because the severe professional training she had received from her father had prepared her for constant application and because she had so many stories waiting to be told, she seldom allowed herself a break from work.

  In the twenty-nine years when she was Mrs Young man Carter Margery Allingham published twenty-four novels in her own name, three romances under a pseudonym, one nonfiction book, The Oaken Heart, and several collections of short stories. Yet still when she died there remained an unfinished Campion novel and many uncollected short stories. (It is from the stories in that generous legacy that this selection has been made. Several have never before seen print, some appeared only in the ephemeral pages of newspapers, none has been published previously in a Margery Allingham collection.)

  It is not easy to comprehend how it was that Marge had time and energy to spare for any activity that was not professional, and wonderment aroused by the statistics of her bibliography is compounded by the knowledge that she rewrote every one of her novels at least three times before sending it to her publisher but, somehow, Marge defied the arithmetic of possibility. She sustained correspondence, thoughtful and informed, with fellow-authors, scholars and theologians, she was an accomplished embroiderer, a competent dressmaker, no mean cook, a generous hostess and, to her most fulfilling of all, untiring in her dedication to the life of Tolleshunt D'Arcy.