[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...