Justice & Law Quote by Margery Allingham

For a line about lab work, this lands like a threat. Allingham takes the cool authority we grant “the chemists employed by the police” and flips it into something almost medieval: blood as evidence, yes, but also as material for execution. The image is grotesquely practical. It doesn’t accuse science of being fake; it accuses it of being too persuasive, too good at turning the body into a narrative that ends at the gallows.

The intent is double-edged. On the surface, it praises forensic ingenuity with a pulp-writer’s relish for the macabre. Underneath, it’s a warning about the state’s appetite for certainty. “Remarkable things” reads like admiration until the punchline reveals what’s being celebrated: not truth, but a tidy mechanism of punishment. The rope metaphor does the heavy lifting. Evidence isn’t just something you find; it’s something you manufacture into a coherent, courtroom-friendly object. Once it’s braided, it holds weight.

Allingham is writing in an era when forensic methods were becoming glamorous and decisive in popular imagination: the lab coat as modern oracle. Detective fiction helped build that aura, then quietly worried at it. Her subtext is that expertise, especially when embedded in policing, doesn’t merely illuminate facts; it authorizes outcomes. The line also hints at class and power: the accused doesn’t face “blood” in the abstract, but an institutional machine that can translate bodily traces into moral verdicts.

It’s witty, bleak, and pointedly modern: the future arrives, and it still knows how to hang people.