One minor character in the book is a six-year-old named Sarah who develops an unlikely and truly delightful friendship with an oversized former crook.Indeed, the characters are often flitting back and forth to nearby London. White Walls, the suburban home where most of the people live or visit, is not the isolated mansion of the usual whodunit.

Instead of peopling her novel with a lot of self-satisfied rich folk, Allingham makes it a mystery about theater people, all of them edgy as a matter of personality, and even the most successful of them is not in any way comfortable.Her amateur detective Albert Campion has some clever moments in the course of the story, but, in the end, it’s the cops who discover the killer, and Mr.Yes, there is a twist at the end when the reader discovers who the killer is, actually a couple twists, but here are some of the ways in which Allingham writes this mystery in her own manner: Margery Allingham, however, wasn’t following anyone else’s rules when, in 1937, she published Dancers in Mourning. (Example: The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know. Indeed, Monsignor Ronald Knox, a Catholic priest and mystery writer, even came up with the Ten Commandments of writing detective fiction. There were a great many conventions to these stories.

And always the heart of the story was the puzzle that the all-knowing detective had to solve. Often the story involved some element of a locked room in which a murder victim is found. These mysteries, also called whodunits, were emblematic of what has been called the “Golden Age” of detective fiction between the First and Second World Wars. A year earlier, in The Arabian Nights Murder, John Dickson Carr trotted out his detective Gideon Fell to figure out how a dead body found in a museum, holding a cookbook, came to be there. In 1937, Agatha Christie published Death on the Nile in which her detective Hercule Poirot has to solve a whole bunch of puzzling murders while on a river steamer cruise.

Campion dancers in mourning