It’s the
late 1940s. Apron Street in London is an aging little neighborhood, with its
bank, its chemist shop (drug store), its attorney’s office, its funeral home,
and other businesses. And at one end sits Portminster Lodge, the ancestral home
of the Palinode family. The home, like the street and the neighborhood, has
seen better times. It’s now owned by a retired dance hall actress who operates
it as a boardinghouse. Members of the aging Palinode family still occupy a few
rooms, and still act as if time stopped 50 years earlier.
But two of
the members of the family have died, under suspicious circumstances. The body
of one is finally exhumed, and it’s discovered she was poisoned. Private
detective Albert Campion, at the request of the police and his old friend the retired
dance-hall actress, moves in to see if he can determine what’s happening.
Campion
discovers all kinds of unusual things happening – strange goings-on at the
funeral home, unusual activities by the boardinghouse residents, an unexpected
visit by a high government official asking campion to ignore one aspect of the
investigation, a young man getting attacked, people watching each other in the
streets in the dark hours of early morning. The detective’s own butler and
jack-of-all-trades Magersfontein Lugg is slipped a Mickey Finn in his drink by
his brother-in-law, the proprietor of the funeral parlor.
In More
Work for the Undertaker by Golden Age mystery writer Margery Allingham
(1904-1966), Campion has to sift through all the different strands to determine
not only what is happening but whether or not the strands are even connected.
In one
sense, More Work for the Undertaker,
first published in 1948, is classic Allingham. A decaying old family, her famous
detective Albert Campion, a significant role for his manservant Lugg (one of
the most original characters ever created in mystery fiction), an almost convoluted
mystery, a spot of romance – these are all characteristics of Allingham’s novel
written from the 1920s to the 1960s.
 |
| Margery Allingham |
In another
sense, however, this one also has something akin to the magical, complicated
plots of British writer (and Inkling with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien) Charles
Williams (1886-1945), almost as if Allingham had just read The Greater Trumps or All Hallow’s Eve right before she wrote
her story. Her plot is complex, and it needs a close reading to follow
everything that is happening.
The manservant
Lugg, however, as is often does, almost steals the show. His language, his
knowledge of criminal activity and villains (based on his own past), and his
ability to see right through pretense serves Campion well in his own
investigations.
More Work for the Undertaker is one of Allingham’s more
challenging reads but well worth the effort.
Related:
Top photograph: a London street in
the 1940s, similar to the fictional Apron Street in the story.
1 comment:
Great review. I hope to finally read some of this author over the holidays.
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