Margery Allingham was born in London in 1904. She sold her first story at age 8 and published her first novel before turning 20. She married the artist, journalist and editor Philip Youngman Carter in 1927. In 1928 Allingham published her first detective story, The White Cottage Mystery, and the following year, in The Crime at Black Dudley, she introduced the detective who was to become the hallmark of her sophisticated crime novels and murder mysteries - Albert Campion. Famous for her London thrillers, such as Hide My Eyes and The Tiger in the Smoke, Margery Allingham has been compared to Dickens in her evocation of the city's shady underworld. Acclaimed by crime novelists such as P.D. James, Allingham is counted alongside Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie and Gladys Mitchell as a pre-eminent Golden Age crime writer. Margery Allingham died in 1966.

"Margery Allingham stands out like a shining light. Everything she writes has a definite shape...each book has its own separate and distinctive background" -- Agatha Christie "Miss Allingham has a strong, well controlled sense of humour, a power of suggesting character with a few touches and an excellent English style. She has a sense of the fantastic, and is never dull" Times Literary Supplement "The real queen of crime" Guardian