Margery Louise Allingham (20 May 1904 – 30 June 1966) was an English novelist from the "Golden Age of Detective Fiction", and considered one of its four "Queens of Crime", alongside Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Ngaio Marsh.

Initially believed to be a parody of Dorothy L. Sayers's detective Lord Peter Wimsey, Campion matured into a strongly individual character, part-detective, part-adventurer, who formed the basis for 18 novels and many short stories.

[4] Upon returning to London in 1920 she studied drama and speech training at Regent Street Polytechnic, which helped her manage a stammer which she had since childhood.

She wrote several plays in this period and attempted to write a serious novel, but finding that her themes clashed with her natural light-heartedness, she decided instead to try the mystery genre.

This introduced Albert Campion, initially as a minor character, thought to be a parody of Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey.

[citation needed] Campion is a mysterious upper-class character (early novels hint that his family is in the line of succession to the throne), working under an assumed name.

He floats between the upper echelons of the nobility and government on the one hand, and the shady world of the criminal class on the other, often accompanied by his scurrilous ex-burglar servant Magersfontein Lugg.

The Margery Allingham Omnibus, comprising Sweet Danger, The Case of the Late Pig and The Tiger in the Smoke, with a critical introduction by Jane Stevenson, was published in 2006.

The first of these, Mr Campion's Farewell, was based on notes left at his death by Allingham's husband Philip Youngman Carter; all the rest have been originals.