A S Byatt: Why I love Margery Allingham
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Why do we take pleasure in gruesome death, neatly packaged as a
puzzle to which we may find a satisfactory solution through clues -
or if we are not clever enough, have it revealed by the all-powerful
tale-teller at the end of the book? It is something to do with being
reduced to, and comforted by, playing by the rules.
Rules are essential in the classic detective story. In 1929 Ronald
Knox drew up the Solemn Oath of the Detection Club. His injunctions
included mentioning the criminal in the first five chapters, not
revealing the criminal’s thoughts, making sure that the
detective - and his “Watson” - revealed all their clues,
and not making the detective the criminal.
Three of the Queens of Crime - Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham
and Ngaio Marsh - also seem to have felt that the form demanded that
the detective should be an aristocratic younger son, disdaining a
life of leisure in order to use his good mind and fine moral sense.
Marsh’s gentleman joined the police force and became
Detective Inspector Alleyn. Sayers’s Peter Wimsey and
Allingham’s Albert Campion disguised their brains and their
steeliness beneath the veneer of a vacant, elegant man-about-town,
descended from Saki’s foppish mischief-makers and not unrelated
to Bertie Wooster.
I have never been able to read Agatha Christie - the pleasure is
purely in the puzzle, and the reader is toyed with by someone who
didn’t decide herself who the killer was until the end of the
writing. Sayers, Marsh and Allingham crossed the puzzle fiction with
the romantic novel, and give us elegantly plotted love stories mixed
in with the threads of death and detection.
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Of these three, I love Allingham most, because she wrote best and
is most surprising and satisfactory as a tale-teller. She has things
in common with Georgette Heyer in her mix of pace and lightness. She
has invented her own world, and we recognise with pleasure that we
are in it.
Peter Wimsey’s manservant is the discreet and efficient
Bunter. Campion’s is the wonderfully named Magersfontein Lugg,
a very large, very fat retired cat burglar who has a lugubrious
black moustache, a bald head and a truculent way of speech.
In Allingham’s early, conventional detective stories, the
vacant-looking young man falls slightly in love with some young
woman, who is then taken from him by some more forceful or
determined male.
The usurper I like best is the even more reticent and disappearing
Gilbert Whippet, in The Case of the Late Pig (1937), a servant of
the Mole (Mutual Ordered Life Endowments) who sends Campion
mysterious flowery messages to set him in the right direction, which
is to help out Whippet’s insurance company. Allingham is
wonderful at naming people.
Sweet Danger (1933) is the novel in which the Allingham
“world” becomes more interesting and lively than the plot,
which is a mystery about a Ruritanian inheritance, a lost crown and
big crime. It introduces Lady Amanda Fitton, aged 17, impoverished
and dressed in curtain material, obsessed by batteries and radio,
resourceful and red-headed.
The English countryside is both mysterious and dangerous; there is
witchcraft; everything is brightly coloured and rapid. Amanda says
she will marry Campion when she is “ready”.
Sayers delayed the marriage of her detective and crime-writing
heroine by making the latter, Harriet Vane, embarrassed by having
been tried for her life and rescued by Wimsey.
Marsh’s Alleyn falls in love with a painter, Agatha Troy, who
also has doubts about the grimness of his profession, which last
conveniently for several books. Mr Campion’s marriage to Amanda
is delayed by her youth and his predilection for floating unattached
through life, for not looking too closely at things.
Dancers in Mourning and The Fashion in Shrouds were published in
1937 and 1938, and are the best examples of Allingham’s
capacity to create the atmosphere, and machinery, and ideology, of
enclosed worlds - the stage and the musical in Dancers in Mourning;
the world of haute couture in The Fashion in Shrouds.
In Dancers in Mourning, Campion’s friend Uncle William’s
mendacious and funny “Memoirs of an Old Buffer” have
become a bestseller and a musical.
