The Novel that Wrote Itself

There used to be a rumour among Essex booksellers that the crime writer Margery Allingham was always keen to know if copies of her own first novel, Blackkerchief Dick, had come on to the market. If they did she would buy them, then destroy them.

Blackkerchief Dick was published in 1923 when Margery was just 19 (publicity at the time regularly sliced a year or two off her age to increase her prodigy appeal). She was certainly ‘young’ compared with a similar 19-year-old today and she found the whole experience of being published – and publicized – confidence-sapping, even humiliating. ‘Good God, girl! Haven’t you done anything in your life except write?’ exclaimed one journalist, a question which continued to hurt for many years, perhaps because it contained an element of truth: ‘I was a writer by birth which is not the same as being a born writer.’ Her family wrote advertising copy, weekly serials for the penny papers, sentimental tales. She herself would become an outstanding crime and psychological thriller writer, but she didn’t know that yet. The inspiration for this first novel was obscurely troubling. Its plot and characters had apparently been ‘given’ via a series of eight séances, initially undertaken as a summer holiday pastime in August 1921. The word séance probably makes this sound more occult than was intended. At its most basic level ‘playing the glass’ is a game. A wineglass or tumbler is placed on a table and encircled by letters of the alphabet. Players sit round, usually at night and in semi-darkness, with their fingers on the glass, and ask questions. These will be answered by a ‘spirit’ and the glass will move from letter to letter, spelling out responses. Margery had brought the idea home from school but had refused to play it after a session in her recently deceased grandparents’ home where the results had shocked her. Now they were staying in a rented house in Seaview Avenue on Mersea Island, Essex. They were bored. She suggested they might have another go. I can remember playing this game myself, late at night and against the rules, on the polished wooden floor of an attic dormitory at a girls’ boarding-school. We must have been 14 or 15 years old, nervy and giggly, very ready to be spooked if our experiments showed results – which they did in occasional small ways that were quite enough to send us scuttling back to bed. This was in the apparently safe environment of the late 1960s; Margery and her companions were ‘trying the glass’ in 1921 with the pain of the Great War still manifesting itself like a deep, dark bruise. There was a longing for spiritualism to be true, to be a means of reaching out to those who had gone, so prematurely, to the Other World. Margery was playing with her father Herbert, a writer of melodramatic serial stories, and his friend George Mant Hearn, who wrote boys’ adventures. Her brother Phil, aged 15, also played. He would later earn his living as a cheapjack and fortune-teller, adept at illusion. Little sister Joyce had gone to bed and their mother Em sat out, disapproving of the activity, possibly to Margery’s relief. When Em came to the table, the spirits threw a tantrum. When Margery left it, the responses petered out. The initial surprise for them all was how quickly and surely the glass began to move. Herbert wrote later:

The glass began to move as soon as we touched it and we found ourselves apparently in communication with a person called Joseph Pullen . . . After one or two unimportant questions and replies Hearn asked Pullen if he knew anything about smugglers. This proved a happy suggestion. Pullen was an old smuggler and after this he spoke freely. Then someone (Margery) suggested asking about the Old Ship Inn. On a previous visit to Mersea we’d heard a story about the Ship. The building is now demolished but it was once a notorious smuggling centre. A murder is said to have been committed there and the place was reputed to be haunted. There are still old residents on the island who will tell you that they have seen the ghost. This much we knew when we asked the question that led to such surprising results.

They played from ten o’clock that night until two in the morning. They were all convinced that they were receiving an account of actual incidents and people who had lived on the island over two hundred years before. The next day, they went to East Mersea to take another look at the site of the Old Ship, and Phil travelled into Colchester to check historical details at the Record Office. That night the murderer Dick Delfazio (‘Blackkerchief Dick’) and his victim, Anny Farran, were there to answer their questions. ‘We questioned these about the affair at the Ship and they all gave their evidence just as though they had been witnesses in a police court case.’ Though the players could all ask questions (and Em was sufficiently interested to help transcribe the answers) it became obvious that the flow of spirit testimony somehow depended on Margery. They accepted she wasn’t cheating, so, was she a medium? Herbert was worried. The spirits were so convincing; so apparently ‘in period’, so violent, so drunk. He couldn’t believe that Margery could know the words they used. Margery said nothing to counter this. She may have felt a deep sense of confusion herself. Was the story being told through her – or by her? Many writers of first novels have spoken of how their story seemed to write itself. There’s a magic in the way that fictional characters appear to take on a life of their own, well beyond the author’s conscious intention. But few have recorded an experience quite like this. After their return to London, Margery accepted responsibility by ‘writing up’ the story they had been ‘given’. Six thousand words of séance transcript became over fifty thousand words of novel. The silk-clad Spanish smuggler with the wickedly sharp blade comes to the dull and chilly island, falls in love with an innocent serving girl and finally murders her. Symbols of defloration are embarrassingly evident in the published version. New characters and incidents have been introduced: Mersea Island is evocatively described; more mock-seventeenth-century violent language has been splurged across the pages – to such an extent that Sir Ernest Hodder-Williams, her publisher, asked for it to be toned down. Margery did as she was told but grumbled privately, ‘I do think pirates ought to be allowed to swear, don’t you?’ Perhaps teenage girls should also be allowed to speak without inhibition? Margery had left school early because she wasn’t happy. In 1921 she was reading literature, learning how to write for her living and studying drama and elocution at the Regent Street Polytechnic. This was intended as remedial. She had been a stammerer since early childhood – she called it her ‘ingrowing hobble’. When she arrived at the auditions for entry into the elocution class, she felt terrified:

Then, when the moment came and I stood up and looked at the words before me, my whole mind panicked and shuttered and appeared to explode. I do not know if there’s any kind of baby bird that bursts from its egg like a bomb but if so, I know what it feels like. My speaking voice shot out naked and new and angry in a very cold and hostile world.

From that day she excelled at writing and performing dramatic monologues. Yet as an adult Margery was always reluctant to speak in public. With her ‘ingrowing hobble’ gone, a new fear took its place. She was no longer afraid of what she could not say but what she could, ‘freely, audibly and without a thought’. Immediately after the experience of Blackkerchief Dick’s publication, she shied away from her imagination and linguistic gifts and took a job writing up stories from the plots of silent films. So did she ever reconsider the experience of that first novel – apart from buying up copies to burn? Her last completed novel, The Mind Readers (1965), considers the topic of extra-sensory perception and telepathic communication and explores it in a scientific context. It’s an example of Margery’s characteristically circular thinking, going round a topic and coming at it from the other side. Her husband Pip hated the novel: her brother Phil called it ‘one of your best’. This time Margery was defiant. ‘One takes a great risk by being entirely comprehensible, I think.’ Yet I find that I still want to understand how the mechanical processes actually work, both the moving glass and the flashes of perception. Perhaps it’s the lingering puzzlement from those distant days on the dormitory floor. Or perhaps it’s the blatant nonsense of Margery’s ‘iggy-tubes’ (the pseudo-scientific devices Margery’s young boys strap to their pulse points in The Mind Readers). In Tricks of the Mind the illusionist Derren Brown demystifies such processes. The glass, he says, moves because someone is pushing it – unconsciously. He calls this ‘ideomotor movement’, tiny muscular responses to cerebral activity. So yes, the players (principally Margery) were physically guiding the glass to spell out answers from the ring of letters. There were no spirits. Awareness of ideomotor movement assists mind-reading, as people’s bodies unconsciously mirror their thoughts. It’s a skill which can be practised by adult experts, but it might also work startlingly well in young or naïve people without preconceptions. Applying Brown’s analyses to Margery’s young protagonists in The Mind Readers provides credible explanations for their flashes of insight. And yet and yet . . . there’s still the central mystery, which is not a mystery but a mastery. That’s the development of the perception into a performance (if you’re Derren Brown) or the idea into a novel (if you’re a writer). This is the craft Margery studied all her life and it’s why her last completed novel is so very much better than her first.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 86 © Margery Allingham 2025