'The Novel That Wrote Itself' in Slightly Foxed

I’ve long admired Slightly Foxed — ‘the real readers quarterly’. I remember their kindness in allowing us to have a party in the basement of their offices in Hoxton Square to celebrate the republication of Jan Needle’s Wild Wood. It was a happy evening in exactly the right place, though we were there for Jan and not for me. I felt a little like a child outside, with her nose to the window pane, seeing a world she couldn’t join. I used to feel like that about Sam Llewellyn’s Marine Quarterly — a very similar publication in appearance, and with that indefinable mark of quality that comes from being subscription only and without advertisements.

Why is ‘subscription only + no ads’ a mark of quality, you may ask? Perhaps quality’s not the right word. Perhaps confidence would be more accurate — though I would argue that one breeds the other. What I mean is that periodicals such as Marine Quarterly and Slightly Foxed (which are both owned directly by their editor-proprietors) are selling themselves on their content alone, no advertising subsidy, no distraction on the page, no need for the editor to keep a wary eye on two, quite separate, audiences. It is only the subscribers who must be pleased — and they in turn show their confidence by continuing to renew.

Herbert Allingham (editor and journalist) with Margery Allingham (novelist-in-the-making)

It puts intense pressure on the editor, of course. Particularly when they are also the proprietors. S/he must have an intimate understanding of their subscribers tastes, find the topics and the writers to satisfy these — and always leave their audience wanting a little more. The writers, in turn, must please the editor. No one understood this relationship better than members of the Allingham family, early in the c20th. Herbert Allingham had been a penny paper editor and knew what it was like to have a magazine fail under him. Subsequently, as a writer of fiction in weekly instalments, he knew that if his editors saw circulation begin to fall, he would be told to stop, unpaid. He had to give his editors exactly what they had asked for and what their readers wanted. All the family knew that. So, when Herbert’s daughter, 17-year-old Margery, wanted to write something directly to please herself, she went a very odd way around it.

Margery’s first novel, published 1923 and an embarrassment thereafter.

Blackkerchief Dick, Margery’s first novel, was published in hardback, at 7/6d by the respectable firm of Hodder and Stoughton in 1923 and sold directly through the book trade. Something her father had not achieved in his whole writing life. I am grateful to Gail Pirkis, editor of Slightly Foxed, for allowing herself to be persuaded to give me space to tell the story for her readers. This was the story spelled out in nightly instalments , narrated by the spirits of long dead smugglers, crones and rum-addicts of Mersea Island in Essex. Or was it?