Margery Allingham Critical Essay | Critical Essay by B. A. Pike

Critical Essay by B. A. Pike

[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."…

But things are not what they were, and though the war is all but won, this is London after the Blitz, and the darkness and devastation persist….

[If] the novel makes a statement about war it does so partly in elegiac terms, as a lament for the destruction of beauty and civilisation…. The grim aftermath of London at war is seen less in terms of human suffering than of the destruction of beauty, and specifically of...
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