Margery Allingham
Aka Maxwell March.
Margery Louise Allingham was born in Ealing, London in 1904 to a family of writers. Her father, Herbert John Allingham, was editor of The Christian Globe and The New London Journal, while her mother wrote stories for women's magazines as Emmie Allingham. Margery's aunt, Maud Hughes, also ran a magazine. Margery earned her first fee at the age of eight, for a story printed in her aunt's magazine.
Soon after Margery's birth, the family left London for Essex. She returned to London in 1920 to attend the Regent Street Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster), and met her future husband, Philip Youngman Carter. They married in 1928. He was her collaborator and designed the cover jackets for many of her books.
Margery's breakthrough came 1929 with the publication of her second novel,
The Crime at Black Dudley
. The novel introduced Albert Campion, although only as a minor character. After pressure from her American publishers, Margery brought Campion back for
Mystery Mile
and continued to use Campion as a character throughout her career.
After a battle with breast cancer, Margery died in 1966. Her husband finished her last novel,
A Cargo of Eagles
at her request, and published it in 1968.
Also wrote as: Maxwell March
“A great deal has been written about the forthrightness of the moderns shocking the Victorians, but there is no shock like the one which the forthrightness of the Victorians can give a modern.”
“There are, fortunately, very few people who can say that they have actually attended a murder.”
“Albert Campion: 'I’m serious!'Lugg: 'That’s unhealthy in itself.”
“The process of elimination, combined with a modicum of common sense, will always assist us to arrive at the correct conclusion with the maximum of possible accuracy and the minimum of hard labor. Which being translated means: I guessed it.”
“But there are roughly two sorts of informed people, aren't there? People who start off right by observing the pitfalls and mistakes and going round them, and the people who fall into them and get out and know they're there because of that. They both come to the same conclusions but they don't have quite the same point of view.”
“When Mr. William Faraday sat down to write his memoirs after fifty-eight years of blameless inactivity he found the work of inscribing the history of his life almost as tedious as living it had been, and so, possessing a natural invention coupled with a gift for locating the easier path, he began to prevaricate a little upon the second page, working his way up to downright lying on the sixth and subsequent folios.”
“It was a little skirmish across a century.”
“She rose and followed her bust from the room.”
“I believe that an author who cannot control her characters is, like a mother who cannot control her children, not really fit to look after them.”