Mystery profiles

Margery Allingham was a popular writer of detective fiction in the mid-century decades. She was one of the four “Queens of Crime”, alongside Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and Ngaio Marsh. In the 1970s Penguin released a new edition of her novels. They were packaged in clean, graphic covers that play on visual ambiguity.

The designers were the team of Minale/Tattersfield/Provinciali. Founded in 1964 as Minale, Tattersfield & Partners, it built a reputation as a a leading design agency in London. The company still exists today as Minale/Tattersfield, now a global design brand. 

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The designs are playful, using references in the story or title to inspire clever, concise visuals with a minimum of detail. The Mind Readers (top) shows a profile head in solid red with a smaller head in ghostly negative space peering inside it. In Mrs Campion’s Farthing (last image, below) a half moon is created by another face appearing out of background space.  The play of positive and negative space is ingenious, suggesting the uncertainty and complexity of the plots. The use of solemn black indicates the morbid subject of murder which is at the centre of her stories. 

In some covers, the designers have used variations of the so-called Rubin vase (see below) where a single image creates two perceptions: one of a vase and one of two faces. It relies on the viewer’s perception of the figure-ground relationship, raising the question of what constitutes the object and the background when both operate simultaneously. 

As a visual device it’s a neat metaphor for the detective novel. The notion, seen in Sherlock Holmes stories, that clues abound in a crime scene but are unnoticed or misinterpreted and that only through perceiving them from a particular mental standpoint can the truth be revealed.

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The Rubin vase illusion

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When Margery Allingham died in 1966 her husband, Youngman Carter, completed her unfinished works which were then published by Penguin in the same spirit as her completed works.

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