More Work for the Undertaker

Margery Allingham was born in London in 1904. She attended the Perse School in Cambridge before returning to London to the Regent Street Polytechnic. Her father- author H.J.Allingham - encouraged her to write, and was delighted when she contributed to her aunt's cinematic magazine, The Picture Show, at the age of eight. Her first novel was published when she was seventeen. In 1928 she published her first detective story, The White Cottage Mystery, which had been serialised in the Daily Express. The following year, in The Crime at Black Dudley, she introduced the character who was to become the hallmark of her writing - Albert Campion. Her novels heralded the more sophisticated suspense genre: characterised by her intuitive intelligence, extraordinary energy and acute observation, they vary from the grave to the openly satirical, whilst never losing sight of the basic rules of the classic detective tale. Famous for her London thrillers, such as Hide My Eyes and The Tiger in the Smoke, Margery Allingham has been compared to Dickens in her evocation of the city's shady underworld. In 1927 she married the artist, journalist and editor Philip Youngman Carter. They divided their time between their Bloomsbury flat and an old house in the village of Tolleshunt D'Arcy in Essex. Margery Allingham died in 1966.