{"id":7514,"date":"2026-05-18T12:29:16","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T02:29:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/?p=7514"},"modified":"2026-05-18T12:29:16","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T02:29:16","slug":"the-adventures-of-margery-allingham-by-julia-jones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/?p=7514","title":{"rendered":"THE ADVENTURES OF MARGERY ALLINGHAM by Julia Jones"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>After reading so many Margery Allingham crime novels, I thought I’d find out about the writer herself. But The Adventures of Margery Allingham<\/em> is really a bit of a misnomer, really. Though in the Albert Campion novels, events move at breakneck speed, Allingham’s life was, basically, work.<\/p>\n

She was born in 1904 in Ealing, London, into a literary family. Her father and mother were both writers, as were various other family members. Family magazines, movie magazines, girls’ and boys’ magazines, women’s magazines – they edited, produced articles, answered reader’s letters and wrote serial stories. You could describe them as hacks, but this early training in commercial writing gave Margery the ability to produce stories without any messing around. She was close to her father, who encouraged her, but her mother sounds like a nightmare. Now, we’d probably guess at some undiagnosed mental health condition; she was lively, intelligent and could be charming, but also domineering, attention-seeking, self-absorbed and prone to dramatic shifts in mood and sudden overwhelming passions and enthusiasms.<\/p>\n

The family moved from London to a country house in rural Sussex when she was six, and that childhood landscape was one she kept returning to in life and in her fiction. She and her brother were cared for by the servants and their Nurse, because their parents, like most middle-class Edwardians, were not at all hands-on. Besides, they took their professional obligations seriously. She was a lonely child, who lived in her own imagination.<\/p>\n

My clearest recollection is my own frustration. I was energetic, affectionate and lonely, and all the interesting people appeared to be on the other side of glass.<\/em><\/p>\n

In adolescence, she worried about her weight (a thyroid condition was discovered later in life) and became very self-conscious. In 1920, back in London, she studied speech and drama. Which seems an an odd choice for a shy girl, but apparently it cured her stammer and she was able to throw herself into student life, acting, writing plays and monologues, creating costumes, making friends – she loved it all.<\/p>\n

Of course, she was always writing. As soon as she could, she did, earning her first fee, at the age of 8, for a story published in her aunt’s magazine.\u00a0 In 1923, when she was 19, her first book, a historical drama Blackerchief Dick<\/em> was published. In 1928, there was a mystery, The White Cottage Mystery<\/em>, and then in 1929 she hit her stride with The Crime at Black Dudley.<\/em> That marked the first appearance of Albert Campion. He was a minor character, a pale, yellow-haired, bespectacled young man with a vacuous face and a large, lugubrious henchman\/minder called Magersfontein Lugg, but something about him insisted that he wasn’t going to be a one-off. Eventually, Allingham wrote 18 Campion novels, numerous stories and novellas, and Campion evolved all the way into the late 1960’s.<\/p>\n

As for Margery’s own life, as I said, it was mainly work. She married Philip Youngman Carter in 1927. He was a talented artist and designer and produced Margery’s early covers, but freelance work was sporadic and she was the breadwinner. In fact, it seems that most of her early married life was spent supporting him and later his best friend, who came to join them in their country cottage. Later still, another female friend joined the crew.<\/p>\n

WWII changed everything. The household broke up. Her husband joined the army, and Margery was heavily involved in the war effort in their small Essex village. At the same time, she wrote, producing two of the best Campions, Traitor’s Purse<\/em> and Coroner’s Pidgin<\/em>, and a memoir of wartime village life, The Oaken Heart<\/em>.<\/p>\n

After the war, Youngman Carter got himself well-paying work and lived mostly in London. Though they remained a couple, it seems that they lived increasingly separate lives.\u00a0 Youngman Carter was a sociable, lively man, often extravagant, and he loved the good life – which included female companionship. However the couple had regular gatherings of friends at their country house, and were famous for cricket matches and celebrations. All organised, of course, by Margery. And then, when her mother and two other elderly elderly relatives became ill and increasingly dotty, she moved them into a house in the village, and cared for them, She wrote about this experience, too, in a book called The Relay<\/em>.<\/p>\n

She died of breast cancer, with her last Campion book unfinished. She’d been too busy to seek a medical opinion about her symptoms, and it was too far advanced by the time she did.<\/p>\n

I do love the imagination, liveliness and wit that Margery channeled onto the page, but now I also think, rather sadly, of her husband and their friends having adventures while she sat and wrote to pay for them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After reading so many Margery Allingham crime novels, I thought I’d find out about the writer herself. But The Adventures of Margery Allingham is really a bit of a misnomer, really. Though in the Albert Campion novels, events move at … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7514"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7514\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7529,"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7514\/revisions\/7529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}