Black Plumes

A classic from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. ＂One of the best books by a mystery novelist whose work is always of first rank.＂ --The New York Times

Something is afoot at the Ivory Gallery in London. A string of suspicious incidents--a Kang-Tse vase broken, a specially commissioned catalog burned, and now a painting slashed--has young Frances Ivory on edge. She suspects that the instigator is her stepsister’s husband, Robert Madrigal, but there’s not much she can do about it while her father is out of the country.

Robert is even interfering in Frances’s love life, encouraging her to marry his loathsome assistant. To stop his infernal matchmaking, Frances agrees to a sham engagement with the painter whose work was defaced. But when Robert disappears after a confrontation with the artist, he’s found stashed in a cupboard, dead. Frances is now drawn into a mystery that will have her second-guessing her family, her fiancé, and even herself . . .

Praise for Margery Allingham

＂Margery Allingham stands out like a shining light.＂ --Agatha Christie

＂The best of mystery writers.＂ --The New Yorker

＂Don’t start reading these books unless you are confident that you can handle addiction.＂ --The Independent

＂One of the finest Golden-Age crime novelists.＂ --The Sunday Telegraph

Margery Allingham, born in 1904 to Emily and Herbert Allingham, was an esteemed English novelist, author, and editor of Christian Globe and the New London Journal. Considered one of the four ＂Queens of Crime＂ from the golden age of detective fiction, Allingham began writing stories and plays at a young age and published her first novel, Blackkerchief Dick, at 19. She later studied drama and speech training at Regent Street Polytechnic in London. Allingham is best known for her character Albert Campion, a sleuth first introduced in The Crime of Black Dudley. Campion was featured in seventeen subsequent novels, and even more short stories. Allingham continued to write until her death on June 30, 1966.