Two
recent republications of mystery novels by Margery Allingham
(1904-1966) show the broad range of writing she was capable of.
In
addition to the 30 Albert Campion novels and more than 10 other works,
Allingham also published three novels under the pseudonym of Maxwell March. One
of those was The Shadows in the House
(1936), which was published in the United States under the title of The
Devil and Her Son. The U.S. title is a much better fit for the story
than the original British title.
Mary
Coleridge is a young woman working as a teacher. She has no family; her only
relative had died, and through the kindness of her aunt’s friend was she able
to eventually procure a position as a teacher. She lives in a boarding house in
London, where she meets and goes out with a young man she’s growing more and
more fond of. But one morning he explains he must leave and not see her again,
and she loses her job on the same day.
She’s
saved by a rather brash newcomer to the boarding house, a young Australian
woman named Marie-Elisabeth Mason, who’s come to England to visit relatives she’s
never seen and to make a career for herself on the stage. She has absolutely no
interest in meeting the relatives; they’ve never even exchanged pictures. She
talks Mary into taking her place for the visit, and with no other possibilities,
Mary agrees. And off she travels by train to meet the family matriarch, Eva de Liane;
her husband, Ted; and her two sons, Bertram and Richard. Richard is in a bad
way and is dying, Mrs. De Liane tells Mary, and unless he gets married, and
married to Marie-Elizabeth, the family will lose the estate.
If
it sounds wildly improbable, it’s because it is, this almost-Gothic novel sets
in the 1930s. A naïve damsel-in-distress, tricked into marriage, her well-being
and increasingly her life threatened; an evil old woman with servants to do her
bidding; and what becomes an impossible love story. In Allingham’s hands, this
wild, almost unbelievable story becomes virtually impossible to put down.
Coroner’s
Pidgin, first published in 1945, is one of Allingham’s Albert Campion
novels and, in fact, one of her best Campion novels, which is saying quite a
bit, since she didn’t write a bad one.
Campion
is on home leave during World War II, and in fact it’s his first home leave in
several years. While his activities remain undefined, he’s been working as
something like a spy behind enemy lines on the continent. But he’s home, taking
a quick bath before he changes and takes a train to see his family. As he sits
in the tub, he hears people coming up the stairs of his London flat on Bottle Street
off Piccadilly. When he dons a bathrobe to find out what’s going on, he finds
his old butler Magersfontein Lugg, a dowager duchess, a young woman, a young
American soldier – and the body of a dead woman deposited on his bed.
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| Margery Allingham |
He
greets his guests, if that’s the right term, and the group is joined by the
dowager’s son, an old friend of Campion’s and something of a war hero. As it
turns out, the body was actually found at the son’s residence, and his mother
grabbed Lugg to help move it. No one expected Campion to be home.
Superintendent
Oates of Scotland Yard soon joins the story, along with several other police
investigators. Campion is prevented time and again from catching his train, and
becomes a most reluctant investigator of the death. But as with everything
else, this isn’t an ordinary murder (as if murder is ever ordinary). This
murder has connections to a nefarious plot involving art treasures and the
Nazis.
And
it is just like Allingham to add a romance and keep the reading guessing to the
very end.
Two
very different stories – an almost Gothic and a classic Campion – show how well
Allingham could capture a reading audience and keep it.
Related:
Top photograph of Forde Abbey in
the United Kingdom by Annie Spratt via Unsplash. Used with
permission. The house is similar to the one described in The Devil and Her Son.
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