Margery Allingham

#1064: The Case of the Late Pig (1937) by Margery Allingham

/ JJ / 21 Comments
Case of the Late Pig

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I’m in a confusing place with Margery Allingham.  I definitely read three of her books when I started getting into Golden Age detective fiction, one of which, I’m almost certain, was The Beckoning Lady (1955) and very hard work indeed.  A few years passed, and I next thoroughly enjoyed the amoral ingenuity of Police at the Funeral (1931) before stumbling badly over Flowers for the Judge (1936) and sort of abandoning her, faintly dissatisfied. So when The Case of the Late Pig (1937) passed into my hands, the mere 132 pages of this Penguin edition commended themselves as an opportunity to reacquaint myself with the author and see how things go.

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#971: (Spooky) Little Fictions – Ghosts from the Library [ss] (2022) ed. Tony Medawar

/ JJ / 2 Comments

With the annual Bodies from the Library collections, which have brought long out-of-print stories of crime and detection back to public awareness, proving rightly popular, editor Tony Medawar turns his attention to another facet of genre fiction with the Ghosts from the Library (2022) collection, in which authors (mostly) better known for their stories of crime and detection have a go at generating some supernatural chills instead.

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#892: “He happens to be around when so many murders crop up…” – Bodies from the Library 2 [ss] (2019) ed. Tony Medawar

/ JJ / 10 Comments

With the Bodies from the Library 5 (2022) collection due in a couple of months, and spin-off Ghosts from the Library (2022) coming later in the year, the time seems ripe to revisit one of the earlier collections which — given the timespan over which I first read them — I failed to review on publication. And since, for reasons too complicated to bore you with here, the second volume was the first one I encountered, it’s there I’ll head today.

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#355: Change a Letter, Alter the Plot

/ JJ / 44 Comments

Paws

If you’ve been paying attention, especially to my comments left both here and elsewhere, you’ll be aware that my typing is rather famously variable.  90% of the time I’m good, but that other 10% — man, some errors there are.  Writing something recently, I made reference to the novel Five Little Pugs by Agatha Christie and then — catching myself in time to correct it — I had a thought…

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#323: Reflections on Detection – ‘Why Do People Read Detective Stories?’ (1944) and ‘Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?’ (1945) by Edmund Wilson [feat. Gladys Mitchell]

/ JJ / 17 Comments

In October 1944 and January 1945, the American newspaper columnist, writer, and critic Edmund Wilson published two essays entitled, respectively, ‘Why Do People Read Detective Stories?’ and ‘Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?’.  The second was in response to the exhortations from readers who, appalled by the first, sent him recommendations to improve his outlook…recommendations which, by all accounts, failed miserably.

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#286: A Conscious Regiment of Women? – The Queens of Crime™, Representation, and the Golden Age

/ JJ / 55 Comments

QoC

It is tremendously difficult to write about gender these days without appearing to be trying to sneak through some (usually unpleasant) agenda.  If anything in the following causes any reader jump to such a conclusion about my intentions, I urge that hypothetical reader to take a glance through any selection of posts on this site — all written by the author of what you’re reading now — to assure themselves that this in no way features in my plans.  I am simply, out of curiosity, asking a question that happens to involve gender.

And the question is this: Has Golden Age Detective fiction been subjected to a deliberate feminisation?  And, if so, to what end?

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