Re-reading Allingham

British novelist Jane Stevenson (The Shadow King), writing in The Guardian, delivers a fulsome tribute to the late crime writer Margery Allingham, creator of detective/adventurer Albert Campion. In one section particularly worth noting, Stevenson opines:

[Allingham] is the least puzzle-minded of great detective-story writers. The question that always interests her most is “why”. Her plotting is a device to express character: why specific people are led to do the things they do, a concern that significantly advanced the genre. 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. As her books demonstrate, she was a shameless eavesdropper. Fat and friendly, she wandered through life looking innocuous and easy to talk to, and the troubled, the boastful or the just plain weird gravitated towards her. There is a certain advantage for a woman novelist in being middle-aged and overweight. You acquire a curious social invisibility: strangers sometimes carry on in front of you as if you weren’t there; or if they chance to fall into conversation, they talk, on occasion, with a surprising lack of inhibition. Allingham’s uncontrollable weight was a source of anxiety and distress in her life (it arose from a thyroid problem), and she was often sad and anxious, but she kept her griefs strictly to herself. The people she encountered found her charming, sympathetic and jolly, and she made good use of this. She listened, and she remembered--not merely to what people said, but to how they said it. She has as good an ear for the quirks of individual speech as any English novelist, and a great gift for seeing what was in front of her. As with Dickens, the panorama of human oddities she presents reflects reality. I was brought up in London, and I have been much given to mooching about talking to strangers. Over the years, I have encountered not a few London characters who could have come straight out of one of her books.

Wow, Stevenson makes me want to revisit the works of Allingham myself. I think I’ve only ever read The Black Dudley Murder (1929), her first Campion outing, and The Tiger in the Smoke (1952, which was chosen by the London Times as one of the “Best 100 Mysteries of the 20th Century”). And, of course, I caught two or three episodes of Campion (1989-1990), the BBC’s charming adaptations of Allingham’s stories, starring Peter Davison. Evidently, I have been remiss in appreciating this author’s work.

Read the full Guardian essay here.

READ MORE: “The Great Detectives: Albert Campion,” by Mike Ripley (The Strand Magazine).