["The Galantrys"] is the biography of a certain James Galantry, half gipsy and half gentleman, and it is also the story of a changing society, the period in English life when the established order of the eighteenth century was giving way to modern industrialism. But although Mrs. Carter, like so many of the English detective-story writers, is notably well-educated—and not ashamed of it—and despite the fact that in her hero's struggles to cope with his complicated heredity she had the material for a perfectly plausible psychological study, her novel sacrifices the realities of both fiction and social history to a quite eccentric interest in genetics. She is obsessed with the science of breeding; drawing most of her lessons from animal mating, she seems to regard all human character, not only James Galantry's, as if it were as susceptible to hereditary determination as the character of a horse. The result is neither convincing nor funny, just odd—especially the last section of her story, which is taken up with Galantry's vision of his descendants right down to their roles in the present war.

Still, there is one good reason, closely related to Margery Allingham's past reputation, why, "The Galantrys" cannot be completely dismissed as merely the indulgence of an eccentricity—Mrs. Carter's prose, which is startling, in these days, for its intelligence and wit. No one who has not himself been deadened by the deadness of contemporary writing can fail to respond to the sweet pleasure of such a sentence as "No one spoke ill of her, everybody loved her absentmindedly."… (pp. 505-06)