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delightful bachelor habits in a serious-minded love affair were to be regularly followedby all writers of detective stories…romance is not Miss Marsh’s metier, and some of the dialogue leaves one a bit hot under the collar. It is hoped, with all due respect to Miss Sayers, that when Alleyn is next confronted with a corpse it will not be in the course of his honeymoon.
    For many enthusiasts, and even crime fiction reviewers, the introduction of a series wife to partner a series detective was corrosive of conventions designed to secure the purity of the puzzle.
    Although this thinking was laced with implicit misogyny, it was not an exclusively male argument. Agatha Christie found love ‘a terrible bore in detective stories’ and felt that it belonged more appropriately in romance stories. ‘To force a love motif into what should be a scientific process went much against the grain.’
    Christie was safe in making these assertions because her detectives were not obviously marriageable material: a heart-stopping romance was not expected of Poirot or Miss Marple. Wimsey, Campion and Alleyn, on the other hand, were youngish, red-blooded males with assumed sexual needs. As Jessica Mann points out, ‘ a series hero who is allowed to mature in other ways must either prove to be a selfish bastard’—like James Bond who played the field—‘[or] fix his affection on one particular girl and…marry her’. Without some degree of sexual and emotional development, these detectives would be stunted. Series romance and marriage fitted also with their authors’ shared aspiration to raise the detective novel above the level of a puzzle plot. If their sleuths were to become more psychologically complex, they needed a third dimension—an emotional life.
    Harriet Vane had simmered away as a potential long-term liaison for Lord Peter Wimsey since her trial for the murder of former lover, Philip Boyes, in Strong Poison in 1930. Wimsey is transfixed at their first meeting. She will face the hangman’s noose if he does not find the real killer. Vane and Boyes have been living together as lovers. Boyes has been an opponent of marriage, so when he turns around a year later and proposes, she is angered by his hypocrisy and leaves. When he is found dead from arsenic poisoning, Vane has both motive and method because she is a crime writer researching this very subject for a new book. All the clues point to her. Certainly Sayers drew on her own life when she created Vane. Like Sayers, Vane is a first-generation woman graduate from Oxford. At heart she is an intellectual attracted, like Sayers, to academia.Vane’s relationship with bohemian-scrupled Boyes is like that of Sayers with John Cournos, and with Bill White. Like her creator, Vane lives in a bedsit in Mecklenburgh Square, Bloomsbury, socializes with artists and writers, and makes an independent living from her crime fiction writing. She has similar experiences as a writer, and holds similar views. Vane refuses Wimsey’s proposal, even after she is acquitted of murder on his evidence. Gratitude, she believes, is no basis for marriage. Like Agatha Troy, Vane is reluctant to give up her freedom, and she finds Wimsey shallow and overbearing. Wimsey pursues his sweetheart, finally marrying her in Busman’s Honeymoon in 1937.
    In keeping with the swashbuckling flavour of her writing, Margery Allingham’s love interest for Campion is adventurous—the Amelia Earhart-style Amanda Fitton. Campion first meets her, aged 17, in Sweet Danger in 1933. Her parents are dead and she lives in the crumbling mansion of Pontisbright Mill in Suffolk, with her brother and sister. They are poor, and to make ends meet the ingenious Amanda works out a way of powering an electric car from a local watermill. This is an aphrodisiac for Campion, who has been called in to establish the ownership of Averna, a tiny oil-rich principality on the Adriatic. The Fittons are claimants, and Campion is charged with