Acknowledgments by Martin Edwards

Author:Martin Edwards
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-08-27T04:00:00+00:00

Margery Allingham and Short Stories

Most accomplished crime novelists demonstrate equal facility with the short story – think, nowadays, of Ian Rankin, Peter Lovesey, Ruth Rendell, and Jeffrey Deaver. Margery Allingham was no exception to the rule. Yet her short stories are, I think, unjustly neglected.

Nonetheless, the continuing appeal of those stories is evidenced by the fact that, a good many years after her death, two volumes of little known work were published. The Return of Mr Campion, a book of previously uncollected items introduced and edited by Allingham’s friend J.E. Morpurgo, and The Darings of the Red Rose.

I was also fortunate enough, when editing Mysterious Pleasures, the Golden Jubilee anthology of the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA), to be allowed the chance to include one of her stories. She was a member of the CWA for a number of years, and she contributed to a couple of its early anthologies. ‘Tall Story’ appeared in Some Like Them Dead, edited by Roy Vickers (1960) and ‘They Never Get Caught’ in Crime Writers’ Choice, again edited by Vickers (1964). At that time, and indeed until recent years, the contents of CWA anthologies largely comprised stories written and published long before (‘They Never Get Caught’, for instance, dates back to the Thirties). Allingham was no doubt persuaded to lend support to the infant venture by allowing her name to be associated with it.

Although I was strongly tempted by ‘They Never Get Caught’, I decided to stick to my plan of including in Mysterious Pleasures stories which have not previously appeared in CWA collections. Casting my net more widely enabled me to renew acquaintance with several stories which have been much anthologised in the past. Enjoyable examples include ‘Evidence in Camera’, ‘The Border-Line Case’, ‘It Didn’t Work Out’ and ‘The Lie about’. There is also some worthwhile material in ‘The Return of Mr Campion’ – unexpectedly, since such volumes tend all too often to sweep up odds and ends that have been neglected previously for very good reason. The stories in Morpurgo’s collection are admittedly a mixed bunch, but I liked especially a couple of the Campion tales. ‘The Case is Altered’ is a good take on the crime-at-Christmas sub-genre and ‘The Curious Affair of Nut-Row’ an agreeable piece of story-telling.

It is often forgotten that Allingham followed in the footsteps of Conan Doyle in that many of her early short stories were first published in Strand Magazine. Morpurgo notes that she was gratified that the magazine accepted six stories from her in 1936: ‘her gratification that this signalled her arrival as a serious writer – “me suddenly getting paid for quality instead of quantity” – was compounded by her gratitude to the current editor, Reeves Shaw – “he taught me about as much as my father had done.”’ But the story which I chose first came out in the magazine that supplanted Strand Magazine as the premier source of short detective fiction. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, still going strong today, published several of her stories over the years.

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