Margery Allingham - a Tribute is an obituary for Margery Allingham (1904-1966) which Agatha Christie contributed to the March 1968 edition of Penguin Book News. The article was later republished in 1989 in The Return of Mr Campion: uncollected stories (Hodder & Stoughton ISBN 9780340502846) and also in the 2020 edition of The Allingham Minibus (Agora Books ISBN 9781913099626).
Christie states that while people often ask whether writers of detective stories read the dective stories of others (they do), the question they should really ask is how many stories do they remember. Here the answer is not very many, and among these, "Margery Allingham stands out like a shining light." Christie admits that she did not know Allingham very well but she got to know her through her writing: "Her whole intriguing persoanlity seems gathered together there." Everything she wrote had a distinctive shape, every book had a distinctive background. Christie states that she did wonder at one time whether Margery Allingham was a pseudonym for Dorothy Sayers because Allingham's detective Albert Campion was somewhat similar to Peter Whimsey at the beginning, but she later realised that the character and Allingham's writing style developed quite differently. Her style developed quite differently from Dorothy Sayer's. Allingham's became "more obscure and more mannered--but less verbose, and I think more interesting." According to Christie, Allingham's writing had a rare quality not usually associated with crime novels: elegance. How seldom are words used with aptitude, delicacy, point."
External links[]
- Penguin Classified Lists from 1946 - see the cover for Penguin Book News Mar 1968. Christie's article is listed as the first one in the table of contents.