The Adventures of Margery Allingham
by Julia Jones
www.golden-duck.co.uk
"The crime novelist Margery Allingham hid the clues to her life as skilfully as those to her plots," wrote Jessica Mann when Margery Allingham: a Biography (author Julia Thorogood) was published by Wm Heinemann in 1991. Readers might be forgiven for thinking that changing book title, publisher and author's surname for a paperback edition is another, rather more inept, attempt at concealment. In fact Jones is my birth surname and the Adventure title was the one that I had originally chosen. I liked its apparent irony. Margery Allingham herself was well aware of the contrast between her superficially un-adventurous life and the colourful events of her fiction. She wished she could have acted, painted, travelled but she did none of these things. Partly she felt trapped – by the expectations of others, by her need to earn and by the increasing obesity that grounded her physically. "I should be more mobile," she wrote defensively, "But so should grand pianos." Yet like Christie's Miss Marple she was privately sure that an intimate acquaintance with the Lilliputian passions and intense politics of domestic life gave insight into the darker and more dramatic aspects of human evil.
The relation between Margery Allingham's life and her novels is both close and complex. As she explained in a private letter "Fiction is my art, my profession. For me it is a highly technical business comparable with dispensing. Personal adventures are always distilled into the drugs to be used but I would not more dream of putting anything in whole or undigested than I'd think of throwing a whole belladonna root into the family soup." The "personal adventures" detailed in this biography include Margery's relationship with classicist Russell Meiggs and her husband Pip's relationship with journalist, broadcaster and occasional detective novelist Nancy Spain. Neither was fully explored in the first edition and both shed light on the fiction as well as the remarkable person who created it. Margery deliberately airbrushed fear, disillusion and despair from her public image. Yet in the manic phrase of bi-polar depression she advised a visiting reporter that "there is a story here if you will look for it I think." The new edition allows more key evidence to be presented and more clues solved – however unsatisfactorily. This, unfortunately, is Life, not golden age detective fiction.
