I'd never heard of Margery Allingham before I signed up for this summer knitting community, but I've read 8.5 of her books since May. If you enjoy Dorothy Sayers or Agatha Christie, you'll like these too.
I read a boatload of Agatha Christie as a kid. I enjoyed the tidiness of her books -- the way the loose ends were squared away in the final chapters -- and the glimpses of a different world. They haven't aged very well, I don't think. (The last time I flipped through one at the library I said to myself, "Hercule Poirot is totally on the spectrum and I wonder if he's also gay." This made me think that Sherlock Holmes and his brother are probably also on the spectrum, which led me down a rabbit hole. I am not the only person to think these thoughts, apparently!)
I didn't read any Dorothy Sayers until I was in my 40s, and then I binge-read all of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries within a few months. I enjoyed them; I might reread them at some point. But he's not my favorite fictional detective. Sometimes I want to give him a brisk shake and say, "Lord Peter, put that in plain English with no obscure quotations, please." (You know, that relentless propensity for literary allusions makes me think about echolalia in movie-quoting kids on the spectrum...)
Margery Allingham was writing detective fiction in the 1920s and 1930s and she's considered one of the Queens of Crime from the golden age of the genre. But she kept writing detective fiction long after the 1930s, and her detective character, Albert Campion, ages across her novels. I don't know why she's so much less familiar to US audiences, but I like her books better than either of her more famous counterparts'. She creates an atmosphere without overdoing it; her characters are enjoyable enough that it's fun to see them reappear in later novels. The plots are paced well, and the conclusions are satisfying.
They are available inexpensively in Kindle format, though some of them seem to have been shoved out into the Kindle market with dubious production values. I bought an edition of The Beckoning Lady with a conspicuous typo on the cover: the title is rendered The Becokning Lady. My edition of Hide My Eyes has the wrong author's name and photo on the cover! You have to wonder who oversaw those decisions, don't you?
But the content is pleasingly diverting despite the bungled details. I'm going to keep reading them, even though the summer discussion group is winding down.
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