Black’erchief Dick: Margery Allingham and the Golden Age of Detective Fiction

There are four so-called “Queens of Crime” that came out of the so-called “Golden Age of Detective Fiction” that include Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, and Dorothy L. Sayers. The fourth is Margery Allingham, who was born to a family of artists and writers in Ealing, London in 1904. 

Margery’s dad was this dude named Herbert Allingham, and he was the editor of The New London Journal and Christian Globe, and Margery wrote stories for the former. Herbert was a pretty prolific and productive pulp writer, making a living writing for long-defunct papers with names like Puck and The Butterfly and Comic Cuts. 

Margery’s mother was Emily Jane Hughes who published work under Emmie Allingham, and she wrote stories for Women’s Weekly, including a five-year run about a lady detective called The Exploits of Phinella Martin. It is safe to say growing up with writer parents had a big influence on young Margery, and sure enough, she started getting paid for her writing at just eight years old. 

Published in 1923, Black’erchief Dick was Margery’s debut novel that she wrote at just 18, not surprisingly at all considering her upbringing. What may be surprising, though, is how different — and how much darker — it is from her future work. Margery wouldn’t break through until 1929 when she introduced Albert Campion to the masses with the publication of The Crime at Black Dudley. 

What started as a minor character that may or may not have been a parody of Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey grew into something of a cultural force. Her publishers loved the character so much that Margery wrote Albert Campion in 17 more novels and more than 20 short stories. 

Margery’s Albert Campion stories in particular did a lot to shape that Golden Age of Detective Fiction and the conventions of the genre, details so specific that this theologist and Catholic priest guy named Ronald Knox — who dabbled in writing detective novels on his own when he wasn’t writing about religion and philosophy — actually codified a Ten Commandments for detective stories. Here are all ten!

1. The criminal must be mentioned early in the story, but it can’t be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know.
2. There are no supernatural or preternatural forces at work.
3. You can have one secret room or secret passage, but only one!
4. No undiscovered poisons can be used, and nothing that will require a long-ass scientific explanation.
5. This one is sounds kinda racist! No Chinaman! There was a lot of anti-Chinese sentiment going on in the 1920s, and Knox said that any story that has a character with “slit-like eyes” is automatically bad. 
6. There are no accidents that accidentally help the detective, and the detective can’t act on an intuition that ends up being right.
7. The crime cannot be committed by the detective himself.
8. If the detective discovers a clue, they need to make sure to tell the audience.
9. If there’s a sidekick, a Watson to the lead’s Holmes, then they must be slightly less intelligent than the audience. 
10. No twins without a very good reason that the reader has been prepared for. 

This Golden Age of mostly British and Irish writers is often referred to as “cosy,” where much of the sex and violence of the plot happens off-page, as opposed to the more “hardboiled” traits that American mystery writers undertook. In 1930, these writers were so dedicated to the genre that they formed the Detection Club, where they agreed to follow Knox’s Ten Commandments in addition to nursing each other’s work. Margery Allingham was indeed a member, but not an initial one. Among others, that honor went to Agatha Christie, R. Austin Freeman, and the Coles, G.D.H. and Margaret, among others.

However, if you bought Black’erchief Dick hoping for that classic Golden Age vibe Margery Allingham is known for, you’ll probably be sorely disappointed. Still, though, this book is fascinating and interesting in the sense that you’re watching one of the best mystery writers the genre has seen cutting her teeth with an adventure drama set during the reign of Charles II circa 1685 when she was just 18 years old. 

This book was not the start of Margery Allingham’s brilliant career or even the start of her career as a mystery writer, but it was the first of many novels.  

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Cover Image Credit: The original cover image of Rocky Coastline by Charles Decimus Barraud is part of the public domain in the United States per Wikimedia Commons.

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