Margery Allingham is preeminent among the writers who brought the detective story to maturity in the decades between the two world wars. She created an aristocratic, unassuming detective called Albert Campion, who matured from "just a silly ass" of the...

American modernist Margery Latimer (1899-1932) is remembered today only as the first wife of Harlem Renaissance author Jean Toomer, the lover of leftist poet Kenneth Fearing, or the close friend of Georgia O'Keeffe, yet her early death cut short the promise of an...

Cerroni, Margery Ann Margery Ann Cerroni, "Marge" to many and friend to all was peacefully born to Eternal Life on Saturday June 11, 2005, in Fort Myers Beach, FL. Marge will be remembered as a loving and devoted wife, mother, sister, aunt, Nana...

[The central figure of Coroner's Pidgin (1945), published in the United States as Pearls Before Swine,] is Johnny Carados, an improbably gifted and cultured nobleman—a Marquess, no less—who dominates, in typical Allingham fashion, a gay, glamorous, and tight-knit group, "an odd, interesting outfit, the members all of an age and all highly intelligent … one of the most closely knit of all the little gangs which had characterised the social life of pre-war London."&#x...

More Work for the Undertaker [1948] is one of the richest works in [Allingham's] canon, within its chosen convention. The qualification is important, since, in some ways, the novel might be seen as a retreat from reality, its characters engaging oddities, its villains clowns, its killer a toy, with trivial passions and designs insufficiently motivated. For all its murder and attempted murders, its surface tensions and sinister underground traffic, Apron Street is cloud-cuckoo land, its atmosphere is ...

Mrs. Carter uses James Galantry as the focus of her idea [in "The Galantrys"]. Into her scrutiny of his character she pours her vision of past and future, of England, of society and, I think, a philosophic vision of what could be. Of course, this adds up to an attempt to write the ideal novel; it is hardly surprising that Mrs. Carter does not realize the attempt completely. But the fact that she had the courage to tackle such a theme gives her book breadth and interest…. [James Galantry...