When people talk about the "golden age of detective fiction" (meaning the 1920s and 1930s), they also often refer to the era's "queens of crime". Agatha Christie generally features in the list, of course, and I've read lots of her novels over the years. Dorothy L. Sayers is there too, and yes, I used to love the Lord Peter Wimsey stories, although I've not revisited them for at least 30 twelvemonths. Josephine Tey is often included (I like her work very much, although I don't think the two that I've read so far are very typical). But also in the list are two authors that I knew not at all: Ngaio Marsh (and this is inexcusable, really, given that she's a fellow New Zealander) and Margery Allingham.

So I decided to check out a bit more of this work. Why not, after all? Not only are such stories generally enjoyable, but they are also little time capsules of the mores of the day, and many of them are available free from the usual sources.

This one is by Margery Allingham (1904-66), and it was first published in 1948 (somewhat after the "golden age" era, then...).


London (various years)

A big plus is the character of her detective, the laconic Albert Campion. Very much in the gentleman-sleuth mode, he's nevertheless a bit of a cypher... We're told he's been doing something mysterious for eight years (the book doesn't give us any details, but the word on the street is that he's a Secret Squirrel), and by way of recompense he's been offered a governorship that he doesn't really want. Whether he's doing his detecting (a sideline for which he's appreciated by the police), or his bread-and-butter job, he specializes in blending in: "His clothes were good enough to be unnoticeable and ... his face, despite its maturity, still possessed much of that odd quality of anonymity which had been so remarked upon in his youth. He had the valuable gift of appearing an elegant shadow." An elegant shadow... That would be nice, wouldn't it? His wife, Amanda, meanwhile, designs aeroplanes... Different.

In this novel, he's been drafted in to help solve a mysterious poisoning case, which seems to intersect with a number of other dodgy dealings on Apron Street. (There's a reasonable, spoiler-free summary here.)

Complementing him is DDI Charlie Luke, whose "pile-driver personality", energy, and gift for dramatic summary mean he gets a lot of the good description.

The book is inhabited by a host of strange, strange characters, chief among them the Palinode family (one of whom has definitely been poisoned, thus triggering suspicion about the earlier passing of another sibling). The Palinodes are like something out of Gormenghast... They're brilliant, weird, and somewhat fey (especially Jessica, whose witch-like characteristics include an uncanny omniscience and a penchant for foul herbal brews). They're also as poor as church mice... The family used to be an important one. According to Luke: "The district's gone down like a drunk in thirty years and the Palinodes with it. Used to have their own carriage once, supported local tradesmen as if they were squires in the county." But the elder brother was a disastrous investor, and now they have hardly anything to live on. Jessica, whose Bible is a tome called How To Live on One-and-Six, says proudly: "I will not tell you my exact income now, but it is counted in shillings and not in pounds. Yet, by the grace of God and the perspicacity of Herbert Boon [the book's author], I am not a poor woman at all. I use the intelligence I possess to live in my own way."

Their house has been taken over by Renee Roper, a one-time variety artiste turned theatrical landlady, whose previous establishment was bombed out in the war. We learn later that she's actually the illegitimate daughter of the late Palinode patriarch, and he left her the house because she's the only child who has any sense of practicality... This is why she takes on the family as lodgers, despite their manifest unprofitability. The fact that she knows the backstory, and the family knows the backstory, but they all pretend they don't, is a touching little detail.



This reviewer regards Allingham as "a genius, and possibly one of the most unique thinkers I have ever had the pleasure of reading... [with] a gift for creating the kind of detailed world that is at once absurd and sinister".

For sure, Allingham gives us a vivid sense of post-war London, evoking (though not dwelling on) rationing, bombed-out buildings, memories of the blitz, the sanctuary offered by Renee's underground kitchen -- not to mention many instances of bereavement.

The title comes from a music hall song, sung by T.E. Dunville around 1890:

More work for the Undertaker,
Another little job for the Tombstone Maker...

Which definitely sets the tone, because this is also an exuberantly Gothic novel. Undertakers, horse-drawn "coffin-brakes" (one such is involved in a police pursuit in the rainy London streets), poisonings, exhumations, references to Dr Crippen's hyoscine (samples of which people apparently kept as curios...) An ancient bank, an antediluvian chemist's, mysterious cellars... Haunted crims, terrified they might be made to "go up Apron Street" (we don't find out what this means until the end, when a racket involving the coffin-borne smuggling of fugitives from justice comes to light)...



Jane Stevenson maintains that this author "is the least puzzle-minded of great detective-story writers", and doubts whether "anybody reads a Margery Allingham for the detection". And it's true... The plot is wildly convoluted, and stretches credulity to breaking point at times.

But as Stevenson argues, Allingham deals with very weighty themes under the light exterior. "Normality", for example: "One aspect of the enduring appeal of her books is that she was truly interested in how a life which seems monumentally weird from outside can be one particular person's normality. What 'ordinary' means for a dodgy undertaker, perhaps, or a retired chorus girl. It is this capacity for observation which has often made people think of her as 'Dickensian'. Dickens invented surprisingly little, but walked about London (he was a great walker), and kept his eyes and ears open. Allingham, as she moved about in shops, on trains or buses, in the street, did the same."

Then there's the question of change: "One theme that repeatedly arises is how individuals adapt to the changing world and, above all, to their own displacement by their natural successors. This is the central theme of More Work for the Undertaker, for example."

And class... Whereas Sayers, Stevenson maintains, "quite patently saw working-class people as lesser beings than the effortlessly superior Lord Peter... this is not a problem with Allingham, who was a person of genuinely wide human sympathy".

I'm not really sure about that, but I guess I can't judge on the strength of one novel... To me, the British obsession with class is really irritating (and it's aggravated here by literal renditions of working-class accents, which I find both condescending and distracting). Mrs Love, for example, the hard-of-hearing woman who helps Renee with the housework, is essentially a comedy part.

Slightly subverting my criticism, however, is the figure of Magersfontein Lugg (where on earth does Allingham get her names from...?). He is Campion's manservant and general aide-de-camp, but unlike the deferential and self-effacing Bunter in Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, Lugg is nothing if not confident and self-assured. He cheerfully addresses his aristocratic boss as "cock", and generally brooks no nonsense.

While still mired in the structures of the day, he refuses to adopt any form of social cringe. He says of Evadne Palinode, for example: "We ain't on Christian-name terms yet and very likely never will be, the class system bein' so stoopid, but a lovely woman! 'You're dirt and can't 'ardly understand what I am a-sayin' of, but I 'appens to like you.' That's the sort she is."

Tucked behind the slender story, then, is a lot that's interesting. I will return to this woman.