Quotes from Margery Allingham

Avril raised his fine head. 'Yes,' he said. 'My poor Margaret.' His face changed only for an instant. The grief upon it appeared and passed like the shadow of a leaf in the wind, but its intensity was so great that Luke, who was still a young man, was dismayed to learn that it could exist.

The cork had come out with a ghost of a pop; it was a beautiful sound, regretful, grateful, kind. "There

Hose-pipe – car exhaust – locked room – all that, not original,' he blurted out at last. 'Plagiarism. All in a book.' 'In

Well, they're all performers, aren't they? All mild exhibitionists. They're so busy putting themselves over that they haven't time to think about anyone else. It's not that they don't like other people; they just never have a moment to consider them.

there. Clean up a bit while you keep an eye on him, Pollit, will you? We'll be just across the landing.' He led the way to Campion's room.

Miss Huntingforest beamed at them. 'If you can eat cakes at eleven o'clock in the morning you're all right,' she said. 'It's an acid test, in my opinion. If a man can eat two cookies before noon and enjoy them there's not much wrong with him.

This estate is called a Phoenix. It's not a municipal venture, it's a social rebirth, a statement of a sincere belief that decent conditions make a decent community, and I'm

all about him stretched the lush green countryside in which there were to every acre a thousand hiding-places, deep and wide and quiet enough to hold so small and worthless a thing as a single unit of mortal clay. "I

as might have been expected, in the dinner-jacket he had worn on the previous evening. His explanation was characteristic. 'Most extraordinary,' he said, in his slightly high-pitched voice.

There were at least four people who realized that Inspector Stanislaus Oates, only lately promoted to the Big Five, was being followed down High Holborn by the short, squat, shabby man who yet bore the elusive air of a forgotten culture about him.

One does not dislike the half of everything. You bore me, you young people, when you talk about one sex or the other, as if they were separate things. There is only one human entity and that is a man and a woman. The man is the silhouette, the woman is the detail. The one often spoils or makes the other. But apart they are so much material. Don't be a fool.

weal on his face. 'I'm inclined to agree with you,' he

No.' He spoke with a tenderness unexpected in him. 'No, lady, no. Put that clean out of your mind. That dear chap and his dog have gone, gone where the dear chaps do go, gone with a few I knew. You've got your own life and you go and live it and make a do of it, as no doubt he'd like you to. Now

It came out an overpowering story, hinting at sickly relatives dying in inaccessible parts of the island, cross-country journeys, and a noble, if exhausted Ramillies crawling gamely home to be persuaded by an adoring wife to snatch what rest he might before attempting the feat of endurance which lay before him as a passenger on an almost epic flight.

Meanwhile Crumb Street, never a place of beauty, that afternoon was at its worst. The fog slopped over its low houses like a bucketful of cold soup over a row of dirty stoves. The

Superintendent Stanislaus Oates of the Central Investigation Department, New Scotland Yard, was one of those happy people who retain throughout their lives a childlike belief in a sharp dividing line between that which is wrong and that which is right. It is this peculiarity which is common to all the great English policemen and is probably the basis of their reputation both for integrity and for stupidity.

Only the most pleasant characters in this book are portraits of living people and the events here recorded unfortunately never took place.

I love you. I really do. As I am now, with these last five years behind me, I am a person who is quite terribly in love with you and will always be – or so I think now, today, in this taxi.

This is not even the stuff dictators are made of, but this is the kind of madness which is often not found out until it is too late.' Campion

If you weren't in love and therefore insane I should punch your head, my boy.

Up the well known creek

There are some people to whom muddled thinking and self-deception are the two most unforgivable crimes in the world.

When you go to her house, look round you. You'll find it full of knick-knacks, every single one of which has been treasured by someone.' He blinked and, lowering his head, looked at Picot with wide serious eyes. 'Whenever I see them they look to me like petrified morsels hacked out of living pain,' he said gravely.

petrified morsels hacked out of living pain