Acknowledgments: Winner of the CWA Margery Allingham Short Story Competition

By Martin Edwards

Martin Edward's 'Acknowledgments' is the winning story of the Crime Writers' Association Margery Allingham Short Story Competition, 2014. Julia Jones, one of the founders and judges of the competition, called it a 'worthy first winner' and said that Allingham 'would have loved it'.

Bloomsbury Reader is delighted to be publishing this deserving winner alongside two additional short crime stories from Martin Edwards: 'Are You Sitting Comfortably?' and 'Neighbours', as well as his essay on Margery Allingham's short story writing and a foreword by Julia Jones.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Nov 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9781448214686

Martin Edwards

Martin Edwards is an award-winning crime novelist whose Lake District Mysteries have been optioned by ITV. Elected to the Detection Club in 2008, he became the first Archivist of the Club, and is also Archivist of the Crime Writers’ Association. Renowned as the leading expert on the history of Golden Age detective fiction, he won the Crimefest Mastermind Quiz three times, and possesses one of Britain’s finest collections of Golden Age novels.

Book preview

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Winner of the

CWA

Margery Allingham

Short Story Competition 2014

MARTIN EDWARDS

Contents

Foreword (by Julia Jones)

Acknowledgments

Are You Sitting Comfortably?

Neighbours

Margery Allingham and Short Stories

About the Author

Foreword

The CWA Margery Allingham short story competition was one of those lovely ideas that seem to come into the world almost perfectly formed – no red-faced kicking and screaming, no tugging with ropes or forceps, no late-night haggling in smoke-filled rooms. The Margery Allingham Society (MAS) was enjoying its annual Birthday Lunch at the University Women’s Club and had invited crime-writer (and Allingham aficionado) Imogen Robertson to make a speech and cut the cake. There’d been a business meeting in the morning at which the treasurer, instead of pursing her lips and shaking her head – as I believe to be the usual custom at AGMs – had been able to announce that, due to the long ago generosity of Margery’s sister Joyce Allingham, the Society had a bit of money in its reserves. How should we spend it to enhance Margery’s reputation and perpetuate her writerly legacy? A Lecture Series? A Convention? Perhaps not. Allingham herself would have presented her excuses and avoided both of them.

Margery Allingham was a hands-on professional writer from childhood. She was born into what we might now describe as a ‘media’ family – there were journalists, editors, photographers, advertising copy-writers and actors among her closest relatives, as well as other inveterate fiction-producers. A story she liked to tell in her later years was of an exasperated housemaid ‘who once snatched a ragged notebook from my hand and exploded, Master, missus and three strangers all sitting in different rooms writing down lies and now YOU startin’! As soon as she could manage a pen she wrote poetry, drama, advertisements and of course, short stories. She was particularly encouraged by her father, a former penny paper editor who had regularly solicited short stories from his readers as well as commissioning established authors. The short story form was, I think, a much more widely accepted part of a writer’s development in the early twentieth century than it is today. It was also a more feasible way of earning money. Margery’s first published story earned her 8/6d from the magazine Mother and Home when she was just thirteen years old and throughout her life she continued to turn to this literary form when she needed prompt amounts of cash.

Once someone at the Birthday Lunch suggested that the Society endow a short story prize the idea was accepted at once. It had a rightness about it. Many members felt that Allingham’s own