Philip (‘Pip’) Youngman Carter
was married to Margery Allingham, one of the Queens of the Golden Age of
English crime writing, for almost forty years. He collaborated on his wife’s
early crime novels, completed Cargo of
Eagles, the book she left unfinished on her death in 1966, and then wrote
two continuation novels featuring her famous detective Albert Campion.
He was an artist, a designer of
book jackets (more than 2,000), a soldier, a journalist, a magazine editor, a
travel writer and a wine writer. He was also the author of around fifty short
stories, most of which were published in magazines and newspapers in the late
1950s.
Shortly before the death of
Margery Allingham in 1966, Youngman Carter began work compiling an anthology of
his stories, including some written whilst on active service in the Western
Desert during WWII, but the collection did not appear in his lifetime.
Now, thanks to extensive work
by the Margery Allingham Society and editor Mike Ripley, Youngman Carter’s Tales
on the Off-Beat finally appears in print, 46 years after the death of
the author, containing 25 of the author’s stories of crimes, con-men,
assassins, treasure-hunters and the downright supernatural.
The anthology, with an
introduction by Barry Pike (chairman of the Margery Allingham Society),
contains Youngman Carter’s famously uneasy tales The Evil Eye of Brother Polidor, Kane’s Doll and Grand Seigneur which all appeared in the
cult magazine Argosy (UK) and several
chosen from the legendary American publication Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. The majority of the stories have
not been seen for almost sixty years but reveal a writer with a knowing and
assured journalistic eye for outrageous characters, a sly sense of humour and a
genuine gift for creating atmospheric settings, particularly in Peter the Blind, set mostly in wartime
London. Reminiscent of Roald Dahl’s Tales
of the Unexpected, Youngman Carter’s stories were genuinely “on the
off-beat” – a description, and a title he himself suggested.
Said editor Mike Ripley: “Youngman
Carter’s stories, sometimes sardonic and always willing to deflate the pompous,
still have the power to amuse and surprise. They fall roughly into three categories:
crime stories, war stories and tales with a supernatural twist and feature a
motley collection of crooks, con-men, soldiers, spies, journalists, artists and
dodgy art-dealers. (He was particularly good on dodgy art-dealers!). In his
Introduction, Barry Pike describes them as ‘intelligent, erudite, fanciful and
exuberant’ and I have no doubt they would have appealed to Margery Allingham’s most
famous creation, Albert Campion.”
Tales on the Off-Beat is
published in hardback, paperback and as an eBook by Ostara (www.ostarapublishing.co.uk) on 15th
October 2015.
For further information contact Mike Ripley on: mikeripley@virginmedia.com.
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