Margery Allingham

She is one of the queens of crime of the four.

There are four queens of crime, Marjorie Allingham, Nayo Marsh, Dorothy B. Sayers, and Agatha Christie.

And arguably, Agatha Christie is at the top.

She's the pinnacle.

No

... or that, that woman Allingham.

Oh.

Look, there's no point crying over spilled milk.

It is entirely impossible to separate Marsh the novelist from Marsh the theater director.

Yeah, people often lump her into the pantheon of the queens of crime from the golden age of detective fiction, standing right alongside Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Marjorie Allingham.

But her background was distinctively different from theirs.

Exactly.

You've got the elegance of prose in people like Dorothy Alseas and Cyril Hare.

You've got the originality of Josephine Tay's plots and the modern feel of her writing, the evocative sense of place in Marjorie Allingham's work in a novel like The Tiger and the Spoke, all coming together under that banner of detective fiction.

And I think there really was the sense of, in that period that the crime novel could be and do anything.

The classic Christie plot relies on a closed circle of suspects and a single setting where everyone present has means, motive and opportunity.

Okay.

And then I have The Murder of Roger Ackroyd because, well, although Dorothy Sayers is a queen of crime, there were four back then, uh, Ngaio Marsh, Maj, oh, Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers.

Agatha Christie is probably the queen of the queens.

Yeah.