Margery Allingham: ‘A thriller is as precise as a sonnet’

In Traitor’s Purse, Allingham gets the pace and tension deliciously right, yet she wrote it in fragments in 1940, in between air raids – and created a wartime masterpiece

This is, I think, my favourite detective story. I return to it again and again, just as soon as I have forgotten enough to re-enter it. The novel has the most amazing plot of any thriller I know. It was written in 1940 at the beginning of the second world war and has an ingenious secret at its centre, which I am not going to give away in case there are still readers who can come to it as the surprise it should be. Allingham’s publishers queried the plausibility of the German plot she imagined – only to discover many years later that she had in fact imagined a secret that did really exist.

The story is not only staggering because of the secret. It is staggering because in the opening pages the urbane Mr Campion is discovered in a hospital, having completely – or almost completely – lost his memory. He knows only that he has to discover and prevent something monstrous, portentous and urgent. The combination of these two strands creates a tension that I’ve never experienced in any other book I have read. The story takes place in Allingham’s own world of the bizarre, the minutely weird, with queer and memorable names, all threaded into formal dinners and police procedures. When reading discussions of Allingham, I have been shocked to find her being criticised for failures of realism. She creates her strange worlds with their own odd structures alongside what we think of as real.

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