Sophie Gee

And again, you know, a kind of mourning scene.

slash elegy for the loss of these sort of aristocratic dynasties and families who have kind of controlled Europe up until this point.

And I think something that's really interesting in terms of what you're saying in relation to Marjorie Allingham's personal story, her journey as a writer, her journey as a kind of person who's engaging with literature as a way of telling these kind of sophisticated, really entangled stories about nationhood and the aftermath of war.

The very first novel she ever wrote was when she was very young.

And it was called Blacker Chief Dick.

It was from 1923.

It was published when she was 19 years old.

And it's a kind of, well, it's a sort of, it's a Daphne du Maurier kind of mashup with, you know, Robert Louis Stevenson or...

You know, I'm thinking of Treasure Island or these sort of adventure stories of the late empire where, you know, there's kind of missing treasure, kind of search for these kind of lost precious objects.

There's a little bit of Wilkie Collins in this early part of her writing.

And in the kind of lead up to Blacker Chief Dick, which is obviously where she's a teenager.

She'd participated in seances and she kind of imagined that she'd had messages from 17th century pirates and smugglers who charged her with the challenge of writing this adventure story, Blacker Chief Dick.

Allingham's husband said that this was sort of very much part of

Marjorie Allingham's sort of literary self-styling, which I'm sure it was.

She didn't kind of literally believe that she'd been visited by 17th century pirates.

But what I kind of want to point out in what you're saying with this backstory is that she's sort of moving away.

Well, it's the famous five again.

She's moving away from the smuggling story, the adventure story, the story of a sort of failed empire, basically, in these kind of early imaginings about a sort of smuggling mystery on the coast with pirates into this much more

TSL-ish, inflected, disassociated kind of urban wasteland of London and the fog.

But again, coming back to a lost treasure.