Cargo Of Eagles

Agatha Christie called her ‘a shining light’. Have you discovered Margery Allingham, the ‘true queen’ of the classic murder mystery?

Agatha Christie called her ‘a shining light’. Have you discovered Margery Allingham, the ‘true queen’ of the classic murder mystery?

Private detective Albert Campion sets out to plumb the secrets of Saltey, an ancient hamlet on the Essex marshes. Once the haunt of smugglers, it now hides a secret rich and mysterious enough to trap all who enter – and someone in the village is willing to terrorise, murder and raise the very devil to keep that secret to themselves.

As urbane as Lord Wimsey…as ingenious as Poirot… Meet one of crime fiction’s Great Detectives, Mr Albert Campion

Author Biography

Margery Allingham was born in London in 1904. She sold her first story at age 8 and published her first novel before turning 20. She married the artist, journalist and editor Philip Youngman Carter in 1927. In 1928 Allingham published her first detective story, The White Cottage Mystery, and the following year, in The Crime at Black Dudley, she introduced the detective who was to become the hallmark of her sophisticated crime novels and murder mysteries – Albert Campion. 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. Acclaimed by crime novelists such as P.D. James, Allingham is counted alongside Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie and Gladys Mitchell as a pre-eminent Golden Age crime writer. Margery Allingham died in 1966.