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 .

Oaken Heart as a 'retro read'

Val Hennessy in the Daily Mail http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-1376465/RETRO-READS.html

The 'Friend' Book Club

D.C. Thomson's People's Friend magazine has made The Oaken Heart their Book Club choice for April. When I think of the years that Margery's family - especially her father Herbert Allingham - laboured for 'the North' and never felt appreciated. Well, I wish Herbert was around to see this. Here's the ad.

Also I've got files of preremptory letters upstairs from dictatorial Dundee editors demanding that Herbert jump to their tune - yet the people I've been dealing with now couldn't have been more approachable and charming. Obviously we've all gone soft ...