Margery Allingham books

Albert Campion Reading Order

Albert Campion Collections Reading Order

Anthologies

Murderous Christmas Stories Reading Order

Short Story Collections

Standalone Novels

Margery Allingham was one of the “Queens of Crime” alongside Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh. Born in London in 1904 into a literary family, she published her first novel at nineteen and went on to write across four decades. Her most enduring creation, Albert Campion, first appeared in The Crime at Black Dudley in 1929. Though initially conceived as a minor character, Campion quickly became the focus of the series and one of the most recognizable detectives of the Golden Age era.

Campion is deliberately enigmatic. He presents himself as a well-meaning fool but is clearly something more, with hints at a distinguished background he never confirms. Over the course of the series he ages and changes in ways unusual for detective fiction of the period – he falls in love, marries, and his world expands beyond the country house settings of his early adventures. The Tiger in the Smoke (1952), set amid the fog of postwar London, is widely considered her masterpiece and shows how far the series had moved from its lighter early tone.

Beyond Campion, Allingham wrote standalone novels and contributed extensively to short story collections and anthologies. Her short fiction has been gathered into several collections over the years, and she edited anthologies of crime writing during her lifetime. Her husband Philip Youngman Carter completed her final novel after her death in 1966, and the Campion character has since been revived by author Mike Ripley in a series of new novels that began in 2014.