Philobiblon

… the good news is that most of her oeuvre is being reprinted. This is the TLS verdict:

whereas Allingham’s earlier works swelter under concert-party lights, rarely deviating, even at their most bloodthirsty, from a jaunty Cluedo-ish idiom – could it be “Poppy in the middle of the night in a cornfield with a dagger” (The Case of the Late Pig)? Was the weapon “a length of lead pipe, possibly stocking covered” (Traitor’s Purse)? “Surely Uncle Andrew didn’t go to church with a coil of rope, a revolver and a clock weight concealed upon him?” (Police at the Funeral) – the later novels revolve around recognizably modern, even prosaic, concerns. Indeed, they have some very twenty-first-century preoccupations: pensions, tax allowances, inheritance law and the fate of the “New Useless” – the “generation which would die of want and neglect” because “the young would be too overworked to look after them” (The Beckoning Lady).