Margery Allingham celebrates the London of 1965

Published in 1965, the year before she died, The Mind Readers was the last complete novel by Margery Allingham. And she, along with Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Ngaio Marsh, was considered one of the for 'Queens of Crime' for detective fiction's golden age.

So whatever I expected when I opened The Mind Readers, it wasn't this celebration of the London of the Sixties::

The Great City of London was once more her splendid self; mysterious as ever but bursting with new life.

In the tightly packed clusters of villagers with the ancient names - Hackney, Holborn, Shoreditch, Putney, Paddington, Bow - new towns were rising into the yellow sky; the open spaces if fewer, were neater, the old houses were painted, the monuments clean. 

Best news of all, the people were regrown. The same savagely cheerful race, fresh mixed with more new blood than ever in its history, jostle together in costumes inspired by every romantic fashion known to television. While round its knees in a luxuriant crop the educated children shot up like the towers, full of the future.

It just goes to show you'll never know what you find when you open a second-hand book.

It's also a reminder that the golden age of detective fiction was still within touching distance when I was a teenager. Allingham was only 62 when she died, Agatha Christie, as we recently saw, lived to ponder the fate of Lord Lucan, and Ngaio Marsh wrote an episode of Crown Court.

Later. Shedunnit podcast has a good episode on Margery Allingham's career as a writer.