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Blackkerchief Dick: a Tale of Mersea Island (Hodder & Stoughton, Ltd., 1923)
Obviously, being juvenalia as it is, the novel is somewhat different from those that would follow it, although it is certainly closely akin in style and voice to the very earliest of Allingham's detective stories, namely The White Cottage Mystery and The Crime at Black Dudley, although the sophistication of the latter is at odds with the simplicity of the former. It is interesting to think that another significant first novel, namely Dorothy L. Sayers' Whose Body?, appeared in the same year. The cover image shown here is from the 1974 Kaye & Ward reprint edition.
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This very first of
Margery Allingham's books was published when she was but a dewey-eyed
girl of nineteen (Editor's Note: actually, the biographies give
us no conlusive evidence as to the condition of Miss Allingham's
eyes at this time, still, it gives us all hope, doesn't it?).
Unlike anything that she ever wrote after, Blackkerchief Dick
is an historical novel, a tale of smugglers and pirates off the
Essex coast. The eponymous central character makes an immediate
appearance in the story, and distinguishes himself by brutally
murdering a member of his crew before the end of the first chapter
- all told, of course, through the lens of discretion and subtlety
typical of the period: still, it's quite a vicious little scene.