Longlist for the Margery Allingham Short Mystery Competition

The Margery Allingham

Short Mystery Competition

Congratulations to all the nominated authors.

2023 CWA Debut Dagger Competition Opens for Entries

 

The most hotly contended competition for would-be crime novelists is now open for entries.

Aspiring crime novelists have until the end of February 2023 to enter the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) Debut Dagger, renowned for opening doors for new writers.

Shortlisted authors often get representation by literary agents, with some going on to achieve publication deals.

The competition for the best new voices in the genre has been going for over 20 years and helped launch the careers of established crime writers, including M W Craven, who entered in 2013.

Craven went on to win the CWA 2019 Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel of the Year for The Puppet Show, and more recently the 2022 Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for Dead Ground.

M W Craven said that, “The CWA Debut Dagger competition gave me a career. I can draw a direct evolutionary line from being shortlisted to the two-book deal I signed.” The decision to take a week off work and write 3000 words for the competition he said, “would go on to change my life.”

Created in 1955, the CWA Daggers are the oldest and most regarded awards in the genre, and for over two decades the CWA has been encouraging new writing with its Debut Dagger competition for unpublished writers.

The Debut Dagger is awarded every year by the CWA for the opening of a crime novel and a synopsis. Budding authors are invited to submit the opening 3,000 words and a synopsis of the full novel of up to 1,500 words before the competition deadline of Tuesday 28 February, 2023.

Maxim Jakubowski, Chair of the CWA, said: “The winner of the Debut Dagger receives £500, but the main motivation to enter is that shortlisting ensures that your work will be brought to the attention of leading agents and top editors, who have to date signed up over two dozen winners and shortlisted Debut Dagger competitors.”

Submissions are judged using a range of criteria including quality of prose, originality of plot, execution of plot, narrative voice, plausibility, characterisation, setting evocation, and good read factor.

From the hundreds of entries from around the world, around a dozen will be longlisted in April 2023. Longlisted authors are asked to submit a further 3,000 words from their novel. The shortlist is announced at CrimeFest in May 2023, and the winner at the Daggers event held in early July.

Judges comprise top crime fiction editors and literary agents, as well as bestselling author, Leigh Russell, who chairs the Debut Dagger competition.

The competition is only open to writers who have never had a publishing contract for fiction over 20,000 words, or self-published fiction more recently than February 2018. Authors of published short stories are eligible, as are authors of published non-fiction.

Also now open for entries is the annual CWA Margery Allingham Short Mystery Competition. Entrants have until Tuesday 28 February 2023 to enter.

The Margery Allingham Society, set up to honour and promote the writings of the great Golden Age author, works with the CWA to run the writing competition. Submissions have a limit of 3,500 words and stories must pay homage to the author’s definition of a mystery. The winner is awarded £500 and two passes to CrimeFest the following year.

Dea Parkin, Secretary of the CWA and competitions co-ordinator, said: “Crime continues to dominate as a fiction genre, and whether it’s celebrity authors such as Richard Osman or established, much-loved writers such as Elly Griffiths who make the headlines, crime and mystery stories are a key touchstone now for publishers. This short story competition is a fantastic way of developing your crime-writing craft and raising your profile.”

Whether you’re writing suspenseful psychological noir, historical crime or traditional whodunnits, the trend has resulted in hit books in the genre from authors such as Nicola Upson, Martin Edwards and Vaseem Khan.

Dea added: “These stories provide familiarity and comfort in an uncertain world as they offer clues, great characters and locations, with the mystery solved in the end and justice served.”

For writing tips, case studies of shortlisted and winning Debut Dagger entrants, and full details on how to enter both writing competitions, go to https://thecwa.co.uk/awards-and-competitions. To receive a regular enewsletter in the run-up to the deadline, join the Debuts https://thecwa.co.uk/supporting-crime-writing/join-the-debuts

Partners in Crime by Nicola Upson

There was something a while back on Twitter that got me thinking - one of those polls where you put contrasting crime writers together to see what a collaboration of their work might look like. Although it wasn’t listed as one of the options, the combination that instantly sprang to mind was Josephine Tey and Margery Allingham - now that’s a book I would love to read. 

Tey and Allingham admired each other’s work and were roughly contemporary, with their first detective novels appearing a year apart: Allingham’s The White Cottage Mystery in 1928 and Tey’s The Man in the Queue (published under her Gordon Daviot pseudonym) in 1929. As far as I’m aware, the two never met in real life, although Tey spent a lot of time in Essex, where Allingham lived. But that’s the beauty of fiction - things that you wish for can happen, and although they don’t go as far as collaborating on a novel in Dear Little Corpses, a chance meeting starts a lasting friendship, and they attempt to solve a crime that touches them both. I really can’t remember a time when I’ve had such fun in bringing two characters together.

They are, of course, very different writers, with contrasting styles - although both write beautifully. Their heroes - Albert Campion and Alan Grant - are much loved but very different men; and whereas Tey often referred in letters to periods of unashamed idleness, Allingham came from a ‘fiction factory’ of professional writers and had published more than eight million words by the time she was thirty-five. But the things they have in common are even more obvious: a deep love of the English countryside, expressed so tellingly in their books; an excitement for London and a passion for theatre (they could easily have met over a gin and tonic in the foyer of the Old Vic); and a fascination with crimes from real life, which filter into novels like The Franchise Affair, The Daughter of Time and The China Governess. 

Most importantly, though, Tey and Allingham share a wit and humanity which is very present in their work: part of the reason we love their books, I think, is because we love them. In each case, the voice that springs so vividly from these pages is wonderful company, and their books reward continued rereading in a way that very few crime novels do. I’m often asked how this series started, and the simplest answer is probably this: I wanted to get to know Tey better, to spend time with her beyond that small but perfectly formed collection of eight crime novels - nine if you count Kif.

And that’s another thing that she and Allingham have in common - they each addressed a world war through a book that was out of character with the rest of their work. Kif (also published in 1929 as Daviot) is Tey’s unflinching account of a boy’s struggle to find his place in society when he returns from fighting in the trenches. The Oaken Heart - Allingham’s only work of non-fiction, published in 1941 - is the story of an English village during the early days of the second world war. The village in question is Tolleshunt D’Arcy in Essex (more famous now for the Bamber murders at White House Farm, which lies on its outskirts) and the book has a cast of characters every bit as rich as Allingham’s novels. As much as I love her fiction, The Oaken Heart is my favourite of her books, and its candour and insight were a huge influence on Dear Little Corpses. She gave me my title, too, which is taken from one of her letters, quoted in Julia Jones’s wonderful biography, The Adventures of Margery Allingham.

At the time this book is set, Tey and Allingham still had their finest work ahead of them. I have no doubt that they’ll team up again further down the series, and I’m looking forward to it already.

Dear Little Corpses by Nicola Upson is published by Faber. (Out Now)

It takes a village to bury a child.1 September, 1939. As the mass evacuation takes place across Britain, thousands of children leave London for the countryside, but when a little girl vanishes without trace, the reality of separation becomes more desperate and more deadly for those who love her. In the chaos and uncertainty of war, Josephine struggles with the prospect of change. As a cloud of suspicion falls across the small Suffolk village she has come to love, the conflict becomes personal, and events take a dark and sinister turn.

Who really did kill Katherine Armstrong??

 

When Katharine Armstrong, a 48 year-old mother of three, died in her bed one morning in February 1921 no one thought other than that she had died of natural causes. Yet, within 15 months, her husband Herbert, would be arrested, tried for murdering her and attempting to poison a rival, at a sensational trial. The proceedings were reported all over the western world as he was found guilty and executed exactly one hundred years ago – the only British solicitor ever to be hanged for murder.

The case was extraordinary because it was on the surface so ordinary: a tale arising out of small town professional rivalries in remote Hay-on-Wye on the English-Welsh border. But the twists and turns of the story could have been written by any of the then fashionable crime writers such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers or Anthony Berkeley who were just starting their careers and who would all reference the Armstrong case in one way or another in their stories over the coming years.

The tale, so famous at the time, has long fascinated me, not just because of the social milieu, ripe in period detail, in which it took place just after the First World War, but because its outcome remains contested. Much remains to be unravelled. Only two full length books have been published in the last fifty years: one convinced that Armstrong was guilty and the other that he was innocent and should never have been hanged. On the centenary of his trial I took up the very cold case and discovered not only poignant details about what happened, but also a previously overlooked witness whose evidence casts a new light on the story.

Katharine was more highly strung and nervous. She became delusional and depressive, worried that she was letting the family down, to such an extent that in 1920 she was committed to an asylum for six months. After she came home in January 1921 she was clearly not cured and went rapidly down hill, dying a month later. Within months Herbert was getting entangled with the town’s rival solicitor Oswald Martin over a land sale which was proving difficult to resolve and becoming acrimonious. One afternoon that October they met for tea at Herbert’s house, during the course of which he handed Oswald a scone, apparently with the words: “’scuse fingers”. After he got home later that evening Oswald fell violently ill, though he soon recovered.

His father-in-law, the local chemist Fred Davies, remembered selling Herbert Armstrong arsenic over the counter (as you could in those days) to make weedkiller to tackle the dandelions in his lawn. It was Davies who suggested his son-in-law might have been poisoned. They remembered that the Martins had received an anonymous box of chocolates shortly before, one of which had made Oswald’s sister-in-law ill.

The local doctor, Tom Hincks, who had treated Katharine and Oswald without any suspicions of foul play, was convinced now that they might both have been poisoned. The Home Office and Scotland Yard were surreptitiously called in and on New Year’s Eve, Herbert Armstrong was arrested in his office. A small, lethal dose of arsenic was found in one of his pockets. Charged with the attempted poisoning of Oswald, Armstrong was in custody when his wife’s body was exhumed from the local churchyard. It was found to contain a large amount of arsenic.

Herbert was tried at Hereford Assizes before Mr Justice Darling, a hanging judge who seems to have set out to find him guilty from the start. In summing up he ignored most of the evidence in Armstrong’s favour – which was quite substantial – and pressed for his conviction. The jury of local famers duly obliged, taking just 48 minutes to reach a verdict. Herbert was hanged at Gloucester prison five months to the day after his arrest. The hangman claimed to have heard him mutter: “I’m coming Kate!” as the trapdoor opened beneath his feet.

Was he guilty? As one reviewer has said of my book: “It’s for you to decide.” And there’s a twist on the very last page.

The Poisoner Solicitor: The True Story of a 1920s Murder Mystery by Stephen Bates.(Icon Books) Out Now

A brilliant narrative investigation into the 1920s case that inspired Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and Margery Allingham. On a bleak Tuesday morning in February 1921, 48-year-old Katharine Armstrong died in her bedroom on the first floor of an imposing Edwardian villa overlooking the rolling hills of the isolated borderlands between Wales and England. Within fifteen months of such a sad domestic tragedy, her husband, Herbert Rowse Armstrong, would be arrested, tried and hanged for poisoning her with arsenic, the only solicitor ever to be executed in England. Armstrong's story was retold again and again, decade after decade, in a thousand newspaper articles across the world, and may have also inspired the new breed of popular detective writers seeking to create a cunning criminal at the centre of their thrillers. With all the ingredients of a classic murder mystery, the case is a near-perfect whodunnit. But who, in fact, did it? Was Armstrong really a murderer? One hundred years after the execution, Stephen Bates examines and retells the story of the case, evoking the period and atmosphere of the early 1920s, and questioning the fatal judgement.

More information about Stephen Bates can be found on his website. You can find him on Facebook and you can also follow him on Twitter @StephenBatesEsq

CfP: The Golden Age of Crime: A Reappraisal

 

The Golden Age of Crime: A Reappraisal

22^nd – 23^rd June 2022 at Bournemouth University

The Golden Age of crime fiction, roughly defined as puzzle-based mystery fiction produced between the First and Second World Wars, is enjoying a renaissance both in the literary marketplace and in scholarship. This conference intervenes in emerging academic debates to define and negotiate the boundaries of Golden Age scholarship.

As well as interrogating the staples of ‘Golden Age’ crime (the work of Agatha Christie and/or Ellery Queen, the puzzle format, comparisons to ‘the psychological turn’), this conference will look at under-explored elements of the publishing phenomenon. Joining us in this fascinating debate, keynotes will be given by Shedunnit creator Caroline Crampton, and Alistair Rolls of the University of Newcastle. This is a hybrid event, taking place both at Bournemouth University and online. Please note, at least one keynote will be online. Our second keynote subject to travel restrictions.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers or panel presentations of one hour. Topics can include, but are by no means limited to, the following:

• Defining the parameters of Golden Age crime

• The Queens of Crime (Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey, Gladys Mitchell)

• Significant male writers of the Golden Age (John Dickson Carr, Anthony Berkeley, Ellery Queen)

• Lesser-known Golden Age practitioners

• Collaborative and round robin novels

• Continuation novels

• The Detection Club

• Parody, pastiche, and postmodernism

• Psychology and psychoanalysis

• Meta-fiction and self- or inter-referentiality

• The language of crime fiction

• The Golden Age and social value

• Nostalgia and heritage

• Writing the past

• Gender, sexuality, and queerness

• Clues and coding

• Crime and the Gothic

• Magic and the supernatural

• Place, space, and psychogeography

• Reissues and rediscovery

• Archival finds and innovations

• The ‘Second Golden Age’

• The influence of Golden Age crime writers on subsequent and contemporary writers

• Interdisciplinary perspectives

• Teaching Golden Age crime fiction

We welcome academic and creative paper proposals. Please email your 200-word proposal and short biographical note to goldenageofcrime@gmail.com no later than 18^th April 2022. Comments and queries should be directed to the same address.

Organisers: Dr J.C. Bernthal (University of Suffolk), Sarah Martin (Bournemouth University), Dr Stefano Serafini (University of Warwick).

Flying Solo? Mike Ripley on writing his latest ‘Albert Campion’ mystery.

When I was first tempted to continue the adventures of Margery Allingham’s famous detective Albert Campion, almost ten years ago now, I had at least the starting point of a couple of introductory chapters written by her first ‘continuation author’, her husband, Pip Youngman Carter, who died in 1969, three years after Margery.

Asked to continue the series, placing an ageing, quintessentially ‘Golden Age’ sleuth in the Swinging Sixties (or thereabouts), I started Mr Campion’s Fox from scratch, saying that I hoped ‘to fly solo with, and do justice to, a great fictional character.’

With the publication of my ninth ‘Campion’ this month, which contains several flying scenes, it struck me that I have never really flown ‘solo’ with these stories.

For a start, thanks to Margery Allingham, I had wonderful, ready-made, resident cast of characters, notably Campion himself; Amanda, his wife of thirty years (in my timeframe); that solid and dependable policeman Charles Luke; the retired spymaster L.C. Corkran; and, of course, Magersfontein Lugg, that most magnificent of indestructible sidekicks. There was also Rupert, Campion’s son, who was coming of age and available to do some of the heavy lifting - or the ‘running, jumping and shooting’ (as Margery put it) which may be now beyond an elderly gentleman detective. And in one of his continuations, Youngman Carter had given Rupert a girlfriend, Perdita Browning, whom I made his wife, which opened the possibility of a ‘next generation’ of Campions.

Given such a repertory company, I could hardly be said to be flying solo when it came to creating characters. All I had to do was come up with a few plots, research the period I was writing about and stay on track with those much-loved characters, and none of that was done ‘solo’.

To keep faith with Margery’s characters, I had fabulous sources I could call on, the most important being Margery’s own Campion novels and short stories, and to avoid mistakes or fill in any gaps, I had the members of the Margery Allingham Society, who were far more versed in the Campion canon than I was. In addition, I had access to the Allingham archives now lodged in the Albert Sloman Library at Essex University, which gave me a fund of ideas and plot points, including, cheekily, allocating Margery’s passport number to an East German spy!

At work in the Allingham archive at Essex University

In an attempt to recreate the flavour of the original books, I decided to have, as often as possible, maps of the locations - mostly found (roughly) in Margery’s beloved East Anglia - mentioned in the story. There I was supremely fortunate in tapping in to the skills of Roger Johnson, an Allingham Society stalwart and a noted Sherlockian scholar, who has done fantastic work illustrating the topography in eight of the nine novels so far. Between us we have tried to capture the geography of Margery’s fictional world, though we might have invented extra parts of Suffolk..

Roger Johnson’s map for Mr Campion’s Fox.

And when it comes to basic plot ideas, especially on Mr Campions Wings, I had, literally, a flying lesson from my long time ‘technical advisor’ (i.e. on anything which remotely involves anything mechanical), research scientist and inventor, Tim Coles. Actually, more than just a flying lesson. 

Tim and I go back a long way, having met in Cambridge in 1971 whilst both of us worked vacation jobs in Joshua Taylor, the city’s poshest department store. (I think Tim was in ‘Electricals’ and I was in ‘Pots, Pans and Glassware’). His family home was on Barton Road - and the house features in the book - and he had a private pilot’s licence, hence the flying lessons. He had even, in a previous life when I was writing my ‘Angel’ series, taught me how to con my way into a local flying club and hotwire a light aircraft; purely for literary purposes, of course.

On one of our regular hook-ups, Tim said he had come up with a method of murder in an engineering workshop, though he was not sure how to get away with it. He was also keen on a Cambridge setting and, being a city of bicycles, had also thought up a bizarre form of velocipede (it’s in the book) which would have certainly appealed to Margery Allingham’s sense of the ridiculous. Given that Margery had decided, back in the 1930s, to give Amanda Campion (née Fitton) a career in aeronautical engineering and that Cambridge had been a kindergarten for spies, I was sure I could cook up something from these ingredients and the year 1965, for various reasons, virtually chose itself and fitted my Campion timeline perfectly.

But I still wasn’t quite ready to fly solo. There was one particular aspect of aircraft design and development in the 1960s I needed help understanding - an aspect which would be of interest to spies and worth murdering for.

Naturally I turned to another old pal, one who knew about both aircraft and spying, Len Deighton.

Now this wasn’t the first time I had picked the encyclopaedic brain of Mr Deighton. Some years ago, over lunch, our conversation had somehow ranged from the economic history of Florence under the Medicis to a currency scam in Vichy France during World War II and the basic plot of Mr Campion’s War began to take shape.

Ripley and Deighton plotting over lunch.

When I explained to Len what I was after, and the help I needed on (very) technical aspects of jet engines and aircraft design, he politely demurred, saying he was not up to speed on such things - however, he knew a man who was, his son Antoni, an aeronautical engineer in America. Antoni turned out to be an enthusiastic and incredibly patient teacher, answering my idiotic questions about hi-bypass engines and teaching me more about air-flow and wing design than I ever thought possible. 

I have made sure that Tim Coles and Antoni Deighton received advance copies of Mr Campion’s Wings (Severn House, 28th October), to give them plenty of time to discover all the mistakes I made despite their expert advice.

All of which goes to prove that when writing a novel, no-one ever flies solo and in my case, especially not with Margery Allingham looking over my shoulder.

                                                                                      Margery Allingham 1904-1966

Mr Campion's Wings by Mike Ripley (Severn House) Published 28 October 2021 £20.99

A gruesome discovery at an aircraft hanger leads Albert Campion into a turbulent mystery set in Cambridge in the middle of the Cold War. "I have often said that my wife is a constant surprise to me." Cambridge, 1965. The honorary doctorate ceremony for Albert Campion's wife takes a dramatic turn when Lady Amanda is arrested by Special Branch for breaking the Official Secrets Act. Never before having taken much interest in his wife's work in cutting-edge aircraft design, Mr Campion sets out to discover more about the top-secret Goshawk Project in which Amanda is involved. He quickly realizes he is not the only one keen to learn the secrets of the project. When a badly mutilated body is discovered at the Goshawk Project's hangar - the result, it would appear, of a bizarre accident - Campion is drawn into a turbulent mix of industrial espionage and matters of national security. And as he attempts to get to the bottom of the deadly goings-on, it seems that the bicycles and punts are almost as dangerous as the aircraft . . .

The CWA Margery Allingham Short story Mystery Competition Short List 2021

 

The Margery Allingham Short Story Mystery Competition Short list has been announced.

The mission is to find the best unpublished short mystery – one that fits into legendary crime writer Margery’s definition of what makes a great story:

“The Mystery remains box-shaped, at once a prison and a refuge. Its four walls are, roughly, a Crime, a Mystery, an Enquiry and a Conclusion with an Element of Satisfaction in it.”

The Shortlist is as follows –

Antony M Brown	For Laura Hope Coincidence leads a young man on the trail of girl called Laura for a wartime spy story involving Dunkirk and the language of chess.
Chris Curran	All the Little Boxes A killer wants to commemorate their successes. But what if murder is hereditary?
Camilla Macpherson	Heartbridge Homicides A story set in TV soapland. The breezy narration never falters as the charm of solving a crime creeps over the soap’s fan.
Hazell Ward	As Dead as Dodo Who would have thought that not removing hearing aids could be so revelatory? Or the importance of which switch turns out the lights?

 The winner will be announced on 1 July 2021.  Congratulations to all the nominated authors. 

Programme for the 2021 Bodies From The Library Conference unveiled.

The Golden Age Of Detective Fiction Conference - 15 May 2021

 The programme for the 2021 Bodies From The Library Conference has been unveiled.

We are very pleased to announce the return of Bodies From The Library with a new Conference for 2021 which, for the first time, will be a free event held online via Zoom on 15th May 2021.

As always, the Conference will celebrate the Golden Age of Detective Fiction and will be of interest to fans of Agatha Christie and her contemporaries – Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L Sayers, John Dickson Carr, Margery Allingham, the Detection Club -and also to those wanting to discover forgotten authors from the period.elebrate the Golden Age of Detective Fiction and will be of interest to fans of Agatha Christie and her contemporaries – Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L Sayers, John Dickson Carr, Margery Allingham, the Detection Club -and also to those wanting to discover forgotten authors from the period.

The conference will start at 1:30pm (BST) and will include an exciting programme of discussions, presentations and panels on Golden Age Detective Fiction Writers and, although we won’t be able to meet in person this year, there will still be an opportunity to talk to leading experts on classic detective fiction and modern authors whose novels follow in the Golden Age tradition. You will also be able to connect with and chat to old and new friends online.

The Conference is open to everyone and we very much hope that, by holding an online event this year, Golden Age fans from around the world will be able to join us.

1.30pm Introduction and Welcome

1.35pm Opening Panel: Martin Edwards, Alison Joseph and Kate Ellis discuss Howdunit: A Masterclass in Crime Writing by The Detection Club

2.05pm Martin Edwards and Christine Poulson assess Anthony and Peter Shaffer

BREAK

2.45pm Jim Noy TBC

3.15pm Moira Redmond and Len Tyler examine The Great Gladys (Mitchell)

BREAK

3.55pm Mark Green looks at Fogginess: A comparison of the writing styles of the four Queens of Crime

4.25pm Steve Barge and Kate Jackson consider The Resurrection of Brian Flynn

BREAK

5.05pm Curtis Evans uncovers The Many Faces of Patrick Quentin, Q. Patrick and Jonathan Stagge

5.35pm Closing panel with Jake Kerridge (Q/A subject to be decided)

The organisers reserve the right to change the programme and timings. Please register using the link below to receive the details for you to join the Conference on Zoom.

Registration link.

For more information visit - www.bodiesfromthelibrary.com

Margery Allingham Short Story Competition Longlist 2020

The CWA have announced the longlist for the 2020 Margery Allingham Competition. Congratulations to all the longlisted writers.

The CWA will announce the shortlist and the winner over the coming weeks. We’ll post the dates here as soon as we have them.

The Boy from Galway Bay by Sally Bothroyd

The Last Letter by Antony M Brown

The Nantes Affair by Briony Cameron

Prey by Amelia Coulon

Voices by Lauren Everdell

The Jewish Laundry by Michael Hare

One Bright Blue Day in Amsterdam by Jennifer Harvey

A Time to Confess by Della Millward

Sting in the Tail by Laila Murphy

A Death in the Library by Emily Organ –

F8 by Alexandra Pendjiky

Morning Murder by Wendy Swarbrick

 

Call for Papers: The Golden Age of Crime: A Re-Evaluation

The Golden Age of crime fiction, roughly defined as puzzle-based mystery fiction produced between the First and Second World Wars, is enjoying a renaissance both in the literary marketplace and in scholarship. This conference intervenes in emerging academic debates to define and negotiate the boundaries of Golden Age scholarship.

As well as interrogating the staples of ‘Golden Age’ crime (the work of Agatha Christie and/or Ellery Queen, the puzzle format, comparisons to ‘the psychological turn’), this conference will look at under-explored elements of the publishing phenomenon.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers or panel presentations of one hour. Topics can include, but are by no means limited to, the following:

Defining the parameters of Golden Age crime

The Queens of Crime (Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey, Gladys Mitchell)

Significant male writers of the Golden Age (John Dickson Carr, Anthony Berkeley, Ellery Queen)

Lesser-known Golden Age practitioners

Collaborative and round robin novels

Continuation novels

The Detection Club

Parody, pastiche, and postmodernism

Psychology and psychoanalysis

Meta-fiction and self- or inter-referentiality

The language of crime fiction

The Golden Age and social value

Nostalgia and heritage

Writing the past

Gender, sexuality, and queerness

Clues and coding

Crime and the Gothic

Magic and the supernatural

Place, space, and psychogeography

Reissues and rediscovery

Archival finds and innovations

The ‘Second Golden Age’

The influence of Golden Age crime writers on subsequent and contemporary writers

Interdisciplinary perspectives

Teaching Golden Age crime fiction

Organisers: Dr J C Bernthal (University of Cambridge), Sarah Martin (University of Chester), Dr Stefano Serafini (Royal Holloway, University of London)

We welcome academic and creative paper proposals. Please email your 200-word proposal and short biographical note to goldenageofcrime@gmail.com no later than 15th December. Comments and queries should be directed to the same address.

CfP - The Golden Age of Crime: A Re-Evaluation

The Golden Age of Crime: A Re-Evaluation

A 2-day international conference at the University of Chester 3-4 April 2020

The Golden Age of crime fiction, roughly defined as puzzle-based mystery fiction produced between the First and Second World Wars, is enjoying a renaissance both in the literary marketplace and in scholarship. This conference intervenes in emerging academic debates to define and negotiate the boundaries of Golden Age scholarship.

As well as interrogating the staples of ‘Golden Age’ crime (the work of Agatha Christie and/or Ellery Queen, the puzzle format, comparisons to ‘the psychological turn’), this conference will look at under-explored elements of the publishing phenomenon.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers or panel presentations of one hour. Topics can include, but are by no means limited to, the following:

Defining the parameters of Golden Age crime

The Queens of Crime (Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey, Gladys Mitchell)

Significant male writers of the Golden Age (John Dickson Carr, Anthony Berkeley, Ellery Queen)

Lesser-known Golden Age practitioners

Collaborative and round robin novels

Continuation novels

The Detection Club

Parody, pastiche, and postmodernism

Psychology and psychoanalysis

Meta-fiction and self- or inter-referentiality

The language of crime fiction

The Golden Age and social value

Nostalgia and heritage

Writing the past

Gender, sexuality, and queerness

Clues and coding

Crime and the Gothic

Magic and the supernatural

Place, space, and psychogeography

Reissues and rediscovery

Archival finds and innovations

The ‘Second Golden Age’

The influence of Golden Age crime writers on subsequent and contemporary writers

Interdisciplinary perspectives

Teaching Golden Age crime fiction

Organisers: Dr J C Bernthal (University of Cambridge), Sarah Martin (University of Chester), Stefano Serafini (Royal Holloway, University of London)

We welcome academic and creative paper proposals. Please email your 200-word proposal and short biographical note to goldenageofcrime@gmail.com no later than 15th December. Comments and queries should be directed to the same address.

Tales on the Off-Beat - Collected short stories by Youngman Carter

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 15^th October 2015.

For further information contact Mike Ripley on: mikeripley@virginmedia.com.