Designed to appeal to the book lover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautifully bound pocket-sized gift editions of much loved classic titles. Bound in real cloth, printed on high quality paper, and featuring ribbon markers and gilt edges, Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.
Meg Elginbrodde, a young war widow, receives photographs that suggest her husband is still alive so she enlists the help of her cousin, Albert Campion to investigate. The man in the photographs turns out to be a known felon, 'Duds' Morrison. Meg's jealous fiancé, Geoffrey Levitt, accosts Duds but both men are attacked by a criminal gang posing as a rackety street band. Meanwhile, Meg's father, Canon Avril, a gentle priest, wonders how Duds came to be wearing Meg's husband's coat. A tortuous trail leads through the oppressive London fog to Jack Havoc, a violent murderer. Set in a dingy and damaged post war London this is Allingham's most sophisticated novel which examines the very nature of evil.
With an introduction by the New York Times-bestselling author of detective fiction, Sara Paretsky.
Allingham, Margery: - "
Margery Louise Allingham is ranked among the most distinguished and beloved detective fiction writers of the Golden Age alongside Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh. Allingham is J.K. Rowling's favourite Golden Age author and Agatha Christie said of Allingham that out of all the detective stories she remembers, Margery Allingham 'stands out like a shining light'.
She was born in Ealing, London in 1904 to a very literary family; her parents were both writers, and her aunt ran a magazine, so it was natural that Margery too would begin writing at an early age. She wrote steadily through her school days, first in Colchester and later as a boarder at the Perse School for Girls in Cambridge, where she wrote, produced, and performed in a costume play. After her return to London in 1920 she enrolled at the Regent Street Polytechnic, where she studied drama and speech training in a successful attempt to overcome a childhood stammer. There she met Phillip Youngman Carter, who would become her husband and collaborator, designing the jackets for many of her future books.
The Allingham family retained a house on Mersea Island, a few miles from Layer Breton, and it was here that Margery found the material for her first novel, the adventure story
Blackkerchief Dick (1923), which was published when she was just nineteen. She went on to pen multiple novels, some of which dealt with occult themes and some with mystery, as well as writing plays and stories - her first detective story,
The White Cottage Mystery, was serialized in the
Daily Express in 1927.
Allingham died at the age of 62, and her final novel,
A Cargo of Eagles, was finished by her husband at her request and published posthumously in 1968."
