Word: allinghams
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...Along with TIME Book Reviewer Martha Duffy, I deplore the apparent demise of the English gentleman-detective [Feb. 1]. But I must rebut her dismissal of Dame Agatha's prose as more "careless" than Miss Allingham's. Christie people are somehow believable people whom one has met before-for good...
...suspense novel, as Maugham pointed out, should be short, inventive and cleanly written, unencumbered by purple passages or digressions. The detective should be an agreeable and intriguing character -perhaps an eccentric, but never a cartoon. Few writers would pass Maugham's test more handsomely than the late Margery Allingham, who, along with Dame Agatha Christie and the late Dorothy Sayers, dominated a golden age of suspense that began in England after World War I. Her aristocratic sleuth, Mr. Albert Campion, survived four decades, 20 books and dozens of malefactors before his creator died in 1966. Even then...
...Miss Allingham's strength -and her husband's-is clear, serviceable prose, less careless than Agatha Christie's and less precious than Dorothy Sayers'. It must be said, though, that Mr. Campion began life in The Black Dudley Murder (1928) in unblushing imitation of Sayers' rococo creation, Lord Peter Wimsey. Both were lean, languid young noblemen who spoke in the high whine that Waugh classified as the British upper class baying for broken glass. Both concealed great skill and cunning behind a facade of graceful, gratuitous vagueness...
Lord Peter expired after a mere eleven novels, smothered by the author's love for her creation. But Allingham took a critical look at her man. By Death of a Ghost (1934), Campion had dropped his drawl and the pose of an amateur adventurer and become a professional detective. He acquired a wife and child and a manservant, who had been a cat burglar until he put on weight...
...small part of the Allingham charm is her chariness with detail. Where Sayers gorges the reader with information about Lord Peter's mulish family and elegant tastes, Allingham drops only a few facts per book. In Police at the Funeral, for instance, the reader learns that Mr. Campion loathes and suppresses his Christian name, Rudolph, which makes it all the more astonishing to discover-eleven books later-that he has called his own son Rupert. Gradually, too, as the series progresses, a caste of semiregulars assembles: the policemen Gates and Luke, the trouble-prone Faraday clan, Sister Val. Perhaps...