Sophie responds to ideas from a beloved author…

This discussion about a Genre of Fiction over time, is basically a Conversation with a Ghost. Recently I have fallen over an essay on her writing by one of the Golden Age Queens of Crime. It is called Mystery Writer in the Box and I had never it read before. Never even heard of it.

Actually I came across it by accident, tracking down a short story. I found the one I was looking for in a collection called The Return of Mr Campion published by Open Road. And there, at the start of the book, headed as “Foreword”, was this miraculous meditation on genre, writing and characters.

It was like encountering an old acquaintance and realising suddenly that she was a kindred spirit. She spoke of so much that I have been concerned about all my writing life.

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She was writing in a wholly different time, on the basis of almost entirely different childhood, both in her personal circumstances and the prevailing culture. Our social assumptions and expectations could hardly have been more different.

Her world was vividly bright but it was in the  past. And not my past.

Margery Allingham could never be more than a ghost to me. An inspiring ghost. But not someone who would ever have felt ay fellowship with me

And yet.. And yet…  I found myself answering her.

Who (and When) Was She?

Margery Alllingham was a contemporary of Georgette Heyer and, like Heyer, published at an early age with the encouragement of a literary father. She did not have the same success.

In fact her second book, which I must say sounds like an absolute turkey, was written, at his instigation, and intended to get under the skin of the Bright Young Things. It never found a publisher. He was bitterly disappointed. His daughter (from the sound of it) was sorry for him but otherwise rather relieved.

The Unrespected Genre – MA

After that, she starts at a place I have inhabited most of my life i.e. writing in a genre that is, in her words “never included in literary lore….Something like sixty percent of all books borrowed in many English public libraries are mystery stories and yet they are always reviewed by themselves, kept apart from orthodox fiction.”

Allingham is philosophical about this. She finds that she can make the Mystery Genre work for her for, to me, a surprising reason. “The Mystery remains box-shaped, at once a prison and a refuge. Its four walls are, roughly, a Killing, a Mystery, an Enquiry, and a Conclusion with an Element of Satisfaction in it.”

An old family friend, a writer of fairy stories called George Hearne, passed on to her some advice from his own experience. Publishers, he felt, approached work with a check list of Must Haves. But after that, the writer was free.

“They never mind you putting all you’ve got into this sort of stuff. They never pay you any more for it, but they don’t stop you.”

“So ever since those days, I have always kept some item on the stocks which has got be given all I have.”

The Unrespected Genre – SW

Indeed you did, Ms Allingham. And by golly, I’m glad you did. So many books, so full of wonderful surprises, even in the developing character of Mr Campion himself.

Yet I wonder whether an editor and publisher would be as permissive these days. Partly they couldn’t afford to be. Sensitivity edit anyone?

Partly they’d be looking at your sales and all those imitators of the current fashion in psychological crime (think Come Wallow in Blood With Me) and they’d say there was no market.

Well not unless you became a lot Cosier. (No wartime spies, no otherworldly interventions. Forget Look to the Lady )

And aren’t you just the tiniest bit peeved that your books are sidelined from  your word ‘the orthodox”? You know how widely read you and your fellow crime writers were. These days we call it the Golden Age and academics give papers on it. I have to admit that the general denigration of romance has had me hopping mad more times than I can count. As readers of this blog will confirm.

And you did always know that the core of your genre was not a trivial one. You nearly always found a good deal of amusement in your characters’ progress through their world.

But you didn’t lose sight of what you say in your essay. “The main message is still the same, simple and on the side of the Angels: ‘It is not good to die; any violent death is the concern of the Community.'”

Surely the nay sayers annoyed you sometimes?

The Genre in Time MA

I have not been able to discover the date of this essay. But from her allusion to the last thirty years “in which the genre has developed and become adult” I infer some time the fifties.

Tiger in the Smoke,her unsettling masterpiece about a knife-wielding career psychopath, was published in 1952. Mike Ripley, who has continued to write stories about Mr Campion, has a interesting comment about this book in his article in The Strand Magazine. Mr Campion conducts his enquiries at a distance from the main action. The book is primarily about post war Britain and “the plight of a displaced generation of young men whose only skill is violence, personified in the character of Jack Havoc.”

She makes it clear that she came to the Mystery in full flight from  Orthodox Literature. Readers might get worked up if a Mystery writer got his facts wrong “but no one, not even in the literary columns, ever wrote to analyse his twisted ego or to sneer at his unformed philosophy.”

Mind you, her fellow writers could be pretty terrifying. “I remember swearing on a skull in front of Miss Dorothy Sayers, who was severe in pince nez and Mandarin Coat, that I would never cheat. I had an over-developed sense of humour in those days but I swore most sincerely; it seemed important. G K Chesterton was there, but he laughed, I noticed.”

The Genre in Time SW

Oh, I see exactly where Mr Campion gets his wry asides and nice sense of the ridiculous.

The way you describe his arrival is so strange, too. “I had no idea of the importance to the writer of this knight errant detective. I thought that one simply had to have a sleuth who was instantly recognisable, so that the reader could follow him without effort… an opium smoker in a dearstalker, perhaps.”

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But there he was, “a private joke-figure, the Zany, laughing inanely at danger”. And you were young and smart and your friends agreed that “the idea of making a detective in a lightearted Mystery story was absurd and rather fun.” And then you say you grew up together, as you certainly did.

In fact, I think you underestimate the originality of Mr Campion, and the charm of his company for the reader. Mike Ripley is surely right when he says that you didn’t fall in love with him.

Mr Campion is a versatile and resourceful person but his detractors call him “negligible”.

So sometimes that’s how his author has to see him, too.

It’s hard. But you didn’t let rose coloured glasses get in your way. And it doesn’t stop the reader falling in love with him, anyway. Sometimes, at least.

Sophie