Part of the Kate Davies summer knitting community involves reading novels by Margery Allingham, ranked alongside Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers as one of the UK's Queens of Crime. I've read all of the Lord Peter Wimsey books and short stories, and I devoured Agatha Christie as a kid. So it seemed likely that I'd enjoy the Allingham books as well. I finished the third one today.
I'm enjoying them enough to keep going. Our hero Albert Campion reminds me in some ways of Lord Peter Wimsey. The books are pleasantly diverting and they do not overwhelm a sensitive reader* with gore or tautly suspenseful plot lines.
*(It's me; I'm the sensitive reader. When I was a preschooler I found Scooby-Doo too frightening to watch, and so I would cover my eyes until the scary parts were over. That probably gives you a sense of my capacity for gore and suspense. I can only tolerate murder mysteries written for the delicate flower.)
It's interesting to be reading Allingham at the same time as my Trollope novel, though. In Trollope's world we can know that a person is inexcusably vulgar if he wears yellow gloves, a sartorial mishap that occurs in both Miss Mackenzie and Marion Fay. In Allingham's novel Flowers for the Judge, I lingered over the description of a natty dresser who disappeared mysteriously. His elegant ensemble included -- can you guess? -- yellow gloves. Were yellow gloves still vulgar, and their presence was supposed to tell us something about either the disappearing man or the tobacconist describing his disappearance? Or had yellow gloves been plucked from the Trash Heap of Bad Fashion Choices and placed in the Catalog of Snazzy Choices by the 1930s? Who can say?
In Trollope's novels, "making love" means "wooing." Obviously it acquired a very different meaning at some point between the 1870s and the 1970s, but when? When an unhappily married Allingham character tells a rival to go ahead and make love to his wife, is he inviting the rival to flirt with her or to pursue carnal knowledge of her? The internet tells me that the current meaning took hold in the 1920s, beginning in the US. So had it traveled across the Atlantic by the 1930s? Who can say?
I'm a little behind the reading schedule for the Kate Davies group (perhaps because I'm trying to finish another fat Trollope novel at the same time), but I am going to keep plugging along. Next up: Dancers in Mourning.
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