Went the day well?

I think it did, rather. The wonderful Eastern Angles are still interested in the possibility of a play about Margery and meanwhile I haven't missed the advertising deadline to grab a space for the Oaken Heart in their spring production Private Resistance by Ivan Cutting. The Eastern Angles spring tour runs from February to May and takes in so many of the village halls and other unpretentious venues where Margery herself would have loved to stage plays. An idea firmly suqashed by her father Herbert in the mid-1920s.

Joyce Allingham (in a dinghy)

New Bottle Street Gazette out. Includes my little piece abut Joyce - cameo in the Salt-Stained Book (click here)

Catriona McPherson misses Margery Allingham

Enjoyable article from Hollywood paper about Catriona McPherson. Says she started writing her own detective novels because MA & co were all dead. I was helping Francis plough through the CWA boxes and boxes of dagger submissions when her first novel came out. Both of us thought how deft and delightful it was - and quite rightly it won the Ellis Peters award that year.

Clearly Catriona's going from strength to strength and I'll be looking out for the next in her series.

Click here

belated notice

Notice of The Oaken Heart in This England

The Oaken Heart & village cricket

I think Margery Allingham would have liked this one -

MAIL ON SUNDAY (London)

May 1, 2011 Sunday

PAPERBACKS
BY SIMON SHAW

The Oaken Heart
by Margery Allingham
Golden Duck £13.99 % £11.99 inc p&p
Crime writer Margery Allingham, best known as the creator of Albert Campion, wrote this stirring tribute to the people of rural England in 1940, when the country lay under threat of German invasion.
It s a portrait of the Essex village in which she lived, disguised under the name of Auburn, and this splendid new edition also contains extracts from her diaries and letters. The Germans can bomb us all they like, she says, but nothing will get in the way of village cricket, which epitomises the very English secret of combining individualism with co-operative effort .