Margery Allingham

Robert is mismanaging the gallery owned by the Ivory family, and trying to get Frances Ivory to marry his associate. When Robert is found dead in a cupboard a file of family secrets and hatreds comes to light.

George Abbershaw goes to stay at Black Dudley Manor for the weekend, intending to propose to Maggie Oliphant. His plans are thrown into disarray when a murder is committed.

First, there is a skeleton in a dinner jacket. Then a corpse in a golden aeroplane. After another body, private detective Albert Campion nearly makes a fourth...

Both the skeleton and the corpse have died with suspicious convenience for Georgia Wells, a monstrous but charming actress with a raffish entourage. Georgia's best friend just happens to be Valentine, a top couturière and Campion's sister. In order to protect Valentine, Campion must unravel a story of blackmail and ruthless murder.

Judge Crowdy Lobbett is a man of justice, an upstanding pillar of American society. And now he's a man in deadly peril, tailed across the Atlantic by the ruthless Simister gang. Luckily he makes the acquaintance of one Albert Campion during his voyage to England. The amateur sleuth bundles the Judge off to the country house of Mystery Mile, where it's a race against time to keep the Simister posse at bay - and to pinpoint the identity of the mastermind behind their criminal empire...

Margery Allingham, already a successful crime writer, was living quietly in the Essex village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy (‘Auburn’) when the Second World War broke out. Her house became an Air Raid Wardens’ post and a First Aid centre, and Allingham herself became responsible for 275 East London evacuees in a rural community of just over 600. Commissioned by American publishing friends to recount what life was like, she began The Oaken Heart in the autumn of 1940, when the Battle of Britain gave way to the London Blitz. Bombs fell, even on the Essex countryside, and a German invasion was fully expected. She conceived her work as an honest letter to America. Places were given fictional names but otherwise she told it like it was, whether funny or painful. Unsentimental yet personal and rich in detail, this is an evocative first-hand account of day-to-day realities in a small community upended and terrified of the future – like so many villages of the time.

Albert Campion is involved in trying to solve the murder of Andrew Faraday, but he soon suspects that a ruthless killer is set on removing all the Faradays one by one.