Herbert Allingham was one of “the men who wrote for the Million”. His melodramatic serial stories ran week after week in the halfpenny papers a hundred years ago. From his first published work in 1886 until his death in 1936 he entertained hundreds of thousands of working-class readers, bringing colour and excitement into hard precarious lives. But was he an author? He didn't think so. Nothing he wrote was ever published in book form and, while the proprietors of the flimsy mass-market magazines made fortunes, their writers remained uncelebrated.

This biography seeks to change that. Herbert Allingham's daughters, detective novelist Margery and her sister Joyce, were proud of their father. They kept boxfuls of his stories, diaries, account books and letters from editors. Julia Jones inherited this unique archive. She has used it to investigate the conditions of Allingham's working life and to glimpse some of his readers. Fifty Years in the Fiction Factory evokes the thrill of weekly fiction in the Great Age of Print.

Herbert Allingham was just one of the writers, artists and editors whose work filled the pages of the story papers that were so popular then and are almost non-existent now. The pennies and halfpennies which were paid by millions of ordinary people for these papers funded the newspaper publishing empires that dominated the twentieth century. This is the story of a hard-working, profoundly likeable writer and stands as a memorial to many other common writers whose hours of labour brightened their readers’ lives.

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