[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...

[If "Tiger in the Smoke"] is not perhaps the finest flower of all the year's garden, it is definitely a flower and not a weed. Indeed, it is a splendid, gaudy, extravagant bloom, guaranteed to please. For it is the product of a real practitioner, of a writer (if I may drop my horticultural figure), willing to take pains with plot, sufficiently talented to write graceful and perceptive prose, sensitive enough to character to make human beings out of victim, criminal and detective alike. ...

["The Galantrys"] is the biography of a certain James Galantry, half gipsy and half gentleman, and it is also the story of a changing society, the period in English life when the established order of the eighteenth century was giving way to modern industrialism. But although Mrs. Carter, like so many of the English detective-story writers, is notably well-educated—and not ashamed of it—and despite the fact that in her hero's struggles to cope with his complicated heredity ...

[Mr. Albert Campion's] earliest adventures were zany thrillers, cheerfully spun tarradiddles which poised him imperturbable as they ramped, and panted and raced and had a fine time with improbability. But midway of his course Mr. Campion's adventures turned sober and became detective stories instead of thrillers…. "The Tiger in the Smoke" is a kind of amalgam of the two sorts. In plot it is a thriller, hanging as perilously from chances as ever Pearl White hung from cliffs...

Miss Allingham has turned from detective fiction to a rather solemn and inconsequent variety of romantic psychology [with Dance of the Years, published in the United States as The Galantrys]…. There is no hesitation in [the] recital of events, but the events themselves, it must be confessed, too often seem entirely arbitrary. Again and again there seems no particular reason, in fact, in spite of James's touchy and brooding preoccupation with his heredity, why he should have behaved as Miss All...

["Blackerchief Dick" is a story] to please a young rather than a grown-up public and so the review of one young reader may be quoted—"it is jolly exciting—all about smugglers and buxom wenches." That is on the whole a very fair description…. [Blackerchief Dick] is very good fun in his way, and the worst that can be said against him is that he is rather too like Captain Hook. He used his knife once too often and that inartistically when he stabbed Anny, the be...

["More Work for the Undertaker"] is a top-notch Margery Allingham murder mystery—that is to say, full of keen characterization, humor, old English atmosphere, a charmingly decadent family and a few sudden deaths. And Albert Campion, shrewd, scholarly crime detector, is there to check the widely scattered clues and put the pieces of the puzzle together…. The unwinding of the mystery is fast and exciting and made more so by the antics of the eccentric Palinodes and their very old n...

I wish that I could express proper enthusiasm for Margery Allingham's ["Cargo of Eagles"] …; this is my final opportunity to review one of the great craftsmen of the English detective story. But this does seem to me to be one of her lesser efforts…. [It] was not a markedly interesting plot to start with and badly lacking in characters. There are good peripheral people, but the parties to the crime are vague sketches, and the action is slow. Anthony Boucher, &#...

Margery Allingham with her first book ["Black'erchief Dick"] has earned for herself no mean place in the ranks of the writers of romantic adventure. Such weaknesses as she displays are clearly those of inexperience, and after taking account of them large measure of credit remains due her…. "Latest Works of Fiction: 'Black'erchief Dick'," in The New York Times Book Review (© 1923 by The New York Times Company; reprinted by per...