TBR 4: Fifty Years in the Fiction Factory

    If you haven't already read Julia Jones's biography The Adventures of Margery Allingham, I can heartily recommend it (as you'll see here), so that augurs well for her recent book on Margery's father, Herbert Allingham. Fifty Years in the Fiction Factory chronicles his working life from 1867 to 1936 when he was one of 'the men who wrote for the Million'.

    "His melodramatic serial stories ran week after week in the ha'penny papers a hundred years ago. From his first published work in 1886 to 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's daughters Margery and 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. The book evokes the thrill of weekly fiction in the Great Age of Print."

Comments

[Barbara]

I second the recommendation of The Adventures of Margery Allingham, especially for Campion fans.

[Cornflower]

It is very good and should be better known.

[Ed]

I was unaware of the biographies of Margery Allingham and her father until I saw this post. In the Margery Allingham novels that I have it is mentioned in biography at the front that she came from a family of writers, but this is the first time I have really learnt anything about her father.

[Cornflower]

Ed, one of the things I love about having this blog is being able, sometimes, to connect books with readers - that's very gratifying! If you go on to read Julia's books I hope you'll get a great deal of interest and enjoyment out of them.