“The
optimism of a healthy mind is indefatigable.” – Margery
Allingham
There’s a saying about crusty old
journalists that they were born with “ink in their blood,” but it’s a phrase that also
applies to the genteel and light-hearted Allingham, who was born into a writing
family and probably started putting pen to paper before she could even walk or
talk.
Writing steadily almost from the
time she was first in school, Margery was the daughter of two well-established
newspaper writers who probably thought nothing of the fact that their daughter
was already considered accomplished in writing before she reached age 10, when
her first plays were already being performed in schools.
Ultimately this British writer
(born on this date in 1904) focused on crime and mystery writing and created one of
the most well-known crime detectives of the mid-20th Century, the
sleuth Albert Campion. And, ironically,
Campion was put into her first novel almost as an afterthought. But he was such an optimistic and interesting
character that her publishers demanded more stories that would focus on
him.
With that encouragement and her
creative and imaginative mind, Margery went to work and wrote nearly 30 novels
with Campion (who many thought to be her alter-ego) at the center of all the
action.
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Allingham died at age 62 from breast
cancer but ever the optimist, she laid out ideas for several more novels “just
in case they’re wrong and I’m not really dying.” As she noted just a few days before her death,
“If one cannot command attention by one’s admirable qualities, one can at least
be a nuisance.”
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