New Allingham audiobook.

Cover of 2015 Omnibus ed.
(in French) of Allingham's
The Crime at Black Dudley

New to Librivox's free audiobook catalog is Margery Allingham's The Crime at Black Dudley (1929), the first novel in her series with the mysterious sleuth Albert Campion. In the 2 June 1968 New York Times, Allen J. Hubin called The Crime at Black Dudley "a fine tale of death in an English country house."

Lou and Herbert Hoover, mystery fans.

On "Hoover Heads," the blog of the Herbert Hoover Library and Museum, Thomas F. Schwartz has written a series of posts on First Lady Lou Henry Hoover and President Herbert Hoover as mystery fans. 

• The friendship of the Hoovers with author Mary Roberts Rinehart.
  
  
• Mystery writers read by the Hoovers, pt 1. (Margery Allingham, Dashiell Hammett, Ellery Queen, Dorothy L. Sayers, S. S. Van Dine)
  
  
• Mystery writers read by the Hoovers, pt 2. (The Detection Club)
  
  
• Mystery writers read by the Hoovers, pt 3. (Margery Allingham, Dashiell Hammett)
  
  
• Mystery writers read by the Hoovers, pt. 4. (Lawrence Saunders, aka John Burton Davis and Clare Ogden Davis; Harry Stephen Keeler)
  
  
  
• Mystery writers read by the Hoovers, pt. 5. (Carolyn Wells)
  
  
• Mystery writers read by the Hoovers, pt. 6. (Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers)
  
  
• Mystery writers read by the Hoovers, pt. 7. (Freeman Wills Crofts, Robin Forsythe)
  
  
• Mystery writers read by the Hoovers, p. 8. (Harry Ashton-Wolfe)

(Photos: Herbert Hoover, Lou Henry Hoover: NYPL)

Margery Allingham's cricket parties.

Courtesy of the East Anglian Film Archive, you can view footage from cricket parties hosted by Margery Allingham and her husband, Philip Youngman Carter, that was shot by Joyce Allingham, Margery's sister, in the period 1937–50. There are some good shots of Margery.

Coming soon: Golden Age mystery map.

Coming in April is This Deadly Isle: A Golden Age Mystery Map, created by author Martin Edwards, which provides a map and guide to more than 50 locations from Golden Age mysteries. Authors covered include Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, Anthony Berkeley Cox, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers, and others.

The Golden Age map joins Agatha Christie's England by Shedunnit's Caroline Crampton, and The Hardboiled Apple by Jon Hammer and Karen McBurnie, with art by Andy Gregg.

Margery Allingham, graphic novel character.

Editions Dargaud has published Cauchemars ex machina (Nightmares Ex Machina) by Thierry Smolderen (text) and Jorge Gonzalez (art), which features mystery author Margery Allingham as a character working for British intelligence during World War II. Visit this link to see a sample, in which Allingham is called "une grande dame de la detection anglaise" (a great lady of English detection).

Results from Sept 10 Bloomsbury auction.

Graham Greene

Some results of interest from the Sept 10 bibliophile auction at Bloomsbury:

• Black Plumes (1940) by Margery Allingham, 1st ed., £260 (approx US$404).

• From Russia with Love (1957) by Ian Fleming, 1st ed., £200 (approx US$311).

• The Fallen Idol, Our Man in Havana, Stamboul Train, The Third Man, and 12 other 1st eds. by Graham Greene, £420 (approx US$652).

• Brighton Rock (1938) by Graham Greene,  1st ed., £300 (approx US$466).

• Unnatural Causes (1967) by P. D. James, 1st ed., £220 (approx US$342).

• The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and The Looking-Glass War by John le Carre, 1st eds., £280 (approx $435).

August Derleth: Best mysteries of 1969.

Essential Solitude: The Letters of
H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth
Hippocampus P

In the Dec. 6, 1969, issue of the Capital [WI] Times, August Derleth (creator of the Holmes-like Solar Pons) listed his selections for the best fiction, nonfiction, and poetry books of 1969. Mysteries and sci-fi appeared under the subtitle "Entertainments" rather than the "Fiction" category. It may have been ethically questionable that he listed H. P. Lovecraft et al.'s Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos—which was issued by Arkham House, the publishing firm he cofounded.

The Godfather by Mario Puzo and Daphne du Maurier's The House on the Strand were two of his fiction selections, whereas two of his sci-fi picks were Fritz Leiber's A Spectre Is Haunting Texas and Douglas Warner's Death on a Warm Wind. His mystery selections included:

Allingham, Margery. The Allingham Casebook. Campion and Charlie Luke short stories
Bernkopf, Jean F., ed. Boucher's Choicest. Some of Anthony Boucher's picks for best mystery short stories
Carr, John Dickson. The Ghosts' High Noon.
Carter, Philip Youngman. Mr. Campion's Farthing. Carter was Allingham's widower
Christie, Agatha. By the Pricking of My Thumbs.
Davies, L. P. Stranger to Town.
Fish, Robert L. The Murder League.
Gardner, John. A Complete State of Death.
Kahn, Joan, ed. Hanging by a Thread.
Marric, J. J [John Creasey]. Gideon's Power.
Marsh, Ngaio. Clutch of Constables.
Queen, Ellery, ed. Queen's Minimysteries.
Simenon, Georges. Maigret in Vichy (aka Maigret Takes the Waters)
Stout, Rex. Death of a Dude.
Whitney, Phyllis A. The Winter People.

Coming Soon: Crime and Detective Fiction

Crime and Detective Fiction, part of the Salem Press series Critical Insights, is scheduled for release in April. I wrote an essay for this volume—"'Your Sin Will Find You Out': Critical Perceptions of Mystery Fiction"—which examines the response to Anna Katharine Green's The Leavenworth Case, James M. Cain's Double Indemnity, Margery Allingham's The Tiger in the Smoke, and Nicholas Meyer's The Seven Per-Cent Solution. Another essay, written by Kerstin Bergman (Lund University), is on Stieg Larsson's work. The editor of the volume is Rebecca Martin (Pace University).

Allingham, Marsh on Why I Really Like This Book.

Recent episodes in Kate Macdonald's podcast Why I Really Like This Book address Margery Allingham's Albert Campion novel Coroner's Pidgin (1945) and Ngaio Marsh's Inspector Alleyn novel Death in a White Tie (1938).

Golden Duck reprints Allingham's Oaken Heart.

Golden Duck, which had previously published Julia Jones's biography The Adventures of Margery Allingham, has reprinted Margery Allingham's splendid nonfiction work on life in a World War II English village, The Oaken Heart (1941). Read the Telegraph review of the reissue here.  Jones wrote an article for Clues 23.1 (2004) on Allingham's book reviews in Lady Rhondda's feminist journal Time & Tide.

Margery Allingham on BBC Radio 4 Extra.

This week on BBC Radio 4 Extra the amnesiac Albert Campion struggles to uncover his own identity in Traitor's Purse (one of the favorite mysteries of 1941). Go here for the schedule; episodes can usually be heard online for up to a week after broadcast.

The Times' recommended mysteries, 1936.

Eden Phillpotts, NYPL

"So prolific are our masters of mystery and detection," wrote the Times of London on July 24, 1936, "that it is only possible to make a brief selection from their latest contributions" (9). Here is what was recommended:

• Margery Allingham, Flowers for the Judge

• E. C. Bentley and H. Warner Allen, Trent's Own Case

• Thomas Burke, Murder at Elstree. "makes our flesh creep."

• Agatha Christie, The A.B.C. Murders; Murder in Mesopotamia

• G. Belton Cobb, No Alibi

• Freeman Wills Crofts, The Loss of the "Jane Vosper"

• [Margaret] Leonora Eyles, They Wanted Him Dead. Eyles was married to D. M. Murray, editor of the Times Literary Supplement.

• R. Austin Freeman, The Penrose Mystery 

• Georgette Heyer, Behold, Here's Poison

• Charles J. Kenny [Erle Stanley Gardner], This Is Murder

• L[eonard]. A[rthur]. Pavey, Forward from Youth. Summary from the London Mercury, 34 (1936): "Brian Ferrands, a victim of shell-shock, is found lying dead of exposure. His friend, Denis Wantage, is induced to search into the dead man's past to find the true reason for his suicide." Pavey was a World War I veteran.

• Eden Phillpotts, A Close Call

• Edward Shanks, Old King Cole. "an unusual 'thriller.'" Mystery author Martin Edwards is distantly connected to Shanks by marriage.

The favorite mystery writers of 1941.

The New York Times of April 18, 1941, reported on a survey conducted by Columbia University Press of the readership of its weekly newsletter The Pleasures of Publishing. Respondents reported reading 4.5 mysteries a month (one hopes they eventually finished the half portion) and the following as their favorite writers (in order of popularity):

1. Dorothy L. Sayers
2. Agatha Christie
3. Arthur Conan Doyle
4. Ngaio Marsh
5. Erle Stanley Gardner
6. Rex Stout
7. Ellery Queen
8. Margery Allingham
9. Dashiell Hammett
10. Georges Simenon

Thus the total is 4 Brits, 4 Americans, 1 New Zealand citizen, and 1 Belgian.

Lord Peter Wimsey was voted best detective; Marsh's Death of a Peer (aka A Surfeit of Lampreys, 1940) was deemed the best story read within the past six months, followed by Allingham's Traitor's Purse (1941).

The return of Allingham's More Work for the Undertaker (1948).

Margery Allingham,  by
Philip Youngman Carter.
Photo courtesy of
B. A. Pike, 
Margery Allingham Soc.

Felony & Mayhem Press continues its noble goal of reprinting the work of Margery Allingham (1904–66) in handsome, affordable paperback editions with More Work for the Undertaker (1948), in which Albert Campion seeks to determine who killed Ruth Palinode, part of a very odd family in west London that includes the brother-in-law of Campion compadre Lugg.

Although Christopher Fowler states in this September piece for the Independent that "many of Allingham's books appear to have vanished into [...a] pea-souper,"  it should be remembered that Allingham's The Tiger in the Smoke (1952) was selected by the Times of London as one of the Best 100 Mysteries of the twentieth century and is particularly admired by Ed Gorman. In addition, fellow Golden Age author L. A. G. Strong stated that Allingham's "One Morning They'll Hang Him" [Allingham Case-Book, 1969], "with a looser texture and a more leisurely pace than those of most American writers, achieves an enviable symmetry, and her red herring, the call at the chemist's shop, is slipped in with Chekhovian adroitness."

Newly updated Allingham biography.

Julia Jones's The Adventures of Margery Allingham has been reissued with new information (who knew that Allingham's husband Philip Youngman Carter had a child with another woman?). Here is a brief review from the Independent.

Jones had an article in the Clues theme issue on Allingham (23.1, fall 2004): "'A fine, sturdy piece of work...': Margery Allingham's Book Reviews for Time & Tide 1938–1944."

Allen Lane and the founding of Penguin.

An absorbing book has proved to be Penguin Special (2005), by Jeremy Lewis, about Allen Lane and the evolution of Penguin Books. Lane, a distant cousin of The Bodley Head cofounder John Lane, went to work at The Bodley Head at age sixteen, eventually running the firm after the elder Lane's death. The firm went into receivership after Allen Lane founded Penguin.

It's hard to grasp, in this age of $1 Dover Thrift editions and ebooks, that Lane's idea for inexpensive paperbacks for the masses would be so controversial, but his fellow publishers, such as Jonathan Cape and Stanley Unwin, were convinced that Lane would go down in flames. Lewis well captures Lane's maverick, somewhat enigmatic personality, both in terms of his choices about what to publish and his refusal to back causes that more activist colleagues advocated, although he stood firm when prosecuted for publishing the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley's Lover. Bonuses in the book are portraits of the colorful publishers of the time (such as the leftist Victor Gollancz and the "lunatic" Walter Hutchinson) and early supporters (such as George Bernard Shaw).

Among the fascinating facts:

• Penguin's first warehouse was a church crypt, and church services were known to be interrupted by swearing in the fulfillment department below.

• Lane became a lifelong friend of Agatha Christie (who began her publishing career with The Bodley Head), despite the firm's notoriously dilatory payment of royalties.

• The first ten Penguin paperbacks included Christie's Murder on the Links and Sayers's The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. The second group included Hammett's The Thin Man. (Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles was originally included in the first group—by mistake, due to a contractual misunderstanding, so it was hurriedly pulled.)
  

• Penguin sent books to British prisoners of war during World War II. Authors published under this program included Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, and L. A. G. Strong (POWs complained when Penguin sent Pelicans, which were titles in its nonfiction line. They wanted adventure and crime novels).

• A key player in the launching of Puffin, the children's book imprint of Penguin, was Noel Carrington, the younger brother of painter Dora Carrington.

• Early managers of Penguin's U.S. operations went on to distinguished publishing careers: Ian Ballantine (founder of his eponymous firm), and Kurt Enoch and Victor Weybright (founders of NAL/Signet).
  

Freeling: Allingham's Tiger in the Smoke is "deplorable trash."

I picked up Nicolas Freeling's Criminal Convictions: Errant Essays on Perpetrators of Literary License (1994), but found little within that I could embrace. Anthony Berkeley Cox's The Poisoned Chocolates Case? "Arid." Dashiell Hammett? "A bad writer." He likes Sayers's Gaudy Night and The Nine Tailors (the latter is called "a sunny, happy work of immense charm"). He is preoccupied throughout with the question of crime and metaphysics, an argument that I found difficult to follow, and likening the writer to an artist or musician. There is a good chapter on Conan Doyle ("Why worry if Doctor Grimesby Roylott—marvellous name—has brought his snake all the way here [and kept it in a safe, poor thing] expressly to bite young girls with financial expectations?"). The estimation of Margery Allingham's The Tiger in the Smoke as "deplorable trash" was the final straw.

I shall have to stick with the grace and thoughtfulness of Michael Gilbert and Vincent Starrett, methinks.

Happy birthday, Margery Allingham.

Margery Allingham, creator of mysterious detective Albert Campion and his sidekick Magersfontein Lugg, was born today in Ealing in 1904. Luckily for readers everywhere, Felony and Mayhem Press is reprinting all of the Campion books, including, eventually, The Tiger in the Smoke (1952), selected by the Times of London as one of the Best 100 Mysteries of the twentieth century. I'm partial to her nonfiction work The Oaken Heart (1941), which is a penetrating look at life in an English village with World War II refugees. Clues ran, in the summer 2007 issue, a discussion of Allingham's short stories by B. A. Pike, chairman of the Margery Allingham Society. Here is an interesting discussion of Campion and Allingham from the Times Literary Supplement.

About the photo: Margery Allingham by Philip Youngman Carter. Image courtesy of B. A. Pike, Margery Allingham Society.

Happy birthday, Margery Allingham.

Margery Allingham, the creator of mysterious sleuth Albert Campion, was born today in 1904. She died in 1966.

You can read appreciations of her work in Margery Allingham: 100 Years of a Great Mystery Writer and the fall 2004 issue of Clues: A Journal of Detection, which was a theme issue on the occasion of her centenary (including an article on Allingham as book reviewer). Felony & Mayhem Press is reprinting the Campion works, and information on the Campion TV series starring Peter Davison may be found here.

I'm a particular fan of The Oaken Heart (1941), which is Allingham's penetrating account of the effect of World War II on her village, including the residents' caring for war refugees.

Stay tuned for the summer issue of Clues, which will include an article on Allingham's short stories.