A friend from
college days at Cambridge asks Albert Campion to talk with his fiancé. She’s
part of the Faraday family in Cambridge, a family dominated by an elderly woman,
and one member of the family has disappeared. Campion agrees, and talks with
her. Within days, the body of the disappeared cousin is found in the river in
Cambridge, bound and shot in the head.
In Police
at the Funeral by Margery Allingham,
her detective goes to Cambridge to try to help solve the crime. Within days,
another member of the family dies, poisoned. And the case takes on a haunting
reality all its own, with more family members threatened. Something evil is
happening inside the Faraday home.
Allingham was a
full member in good standing of the Golden Age of British mystery writers, which
roughly spanned the 1920s to the 1940s. In her case, she continued to write
until her death in 1966. She wrote some 21 Albert Campion mysteries (many saw
him as a kind of response to Lord Peter Wimsey, the
detective created by Dorothy
Sayers). Allingham also wrote some 10 other works, including non-Campion mysteries,
novellas, and an autobiography. She also wrote three mysteries under the pen
name of Maxwell March.
Margery Allingham
Police at the Funeral, first published in 1931, has all the
classic Allingham trademarks – a complex mystery using involving murder; a bit
of romance (if not involving Campion himself, then two of the other
Protagonists), a sense of growing menace as the tension builds, the characters
sometimes believing that supernatural forces are at work (Allingham and Campion
know better), and a denouement followed by a long discussion among the
characters at the end, tying yup any loose ends and laying the mystery out in
its basic outline.
In fact, Police at the Funeral contains all the
standard Allingham trademarks except one majot one – a clever role for
Magersfontein Lugg, the former convict who is now Campion’s servant, chauffeur,
cook, butler, investigation assistant and general factotum. Lugg has only a
tiny part at the very end of the story.
The story is
vintage Allingham, and is currently being published as one of three mysteries
in The
Margery Allingham Box Set #1 (the other two books in the set are Look to the Lady and Sweet Danger.)
In the 1970s,
there was a minor revival of interest in the mysteries that collectively came
to be known as the “Golden Age” – mystery novels published roughly between the
two world wars (with some spillover before World War I and After World War II.
The writers were British, Americans who wrote British-like stories, and
Americans who wrote like Americans. The names: Agatha Christie, John Dickson
Carr, S.S. Van Dine, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Josephine Tey, Dorothy
Sayers, G.K. Chesterton, and many more.
And there was a
British writer, born in 1904, who began writing stories and plays at a very
young age and struggled until she published a story in1929 about an
aristocratic detective who never revealed his real name and title, gave the
appearance of being “not all there” and was just rather odd. His name was
Albert Campion; his story was entitled The Crime at Black Dudley, and his
creator was named Margery Allingham.
Her writing
career took off. Campion seemed to have struck a chord with the British (and
later American) reading public.
Allingham kept writing
about her detective and other subjects until her death in 1966. A few Campion
stories that were in process at the time of her death were published with the
help of another writer, Philip Youngman Carter. During the minor Golden Age
revival in the 1970s, I came across The
Crime at Black Dudley, Mystery
Mile, Police
at the Funeral, Death
of a Ghost, and Sweet
Danger. I became something of an Allingham fan. Her writing, much like that
of Dorothy Sayers, appealed to the mind and much as it did to a sense of
mystery.
Now the Margery Allingham
Estate is republishing her works, and the first volume is actually three – The
Essential Margery Allingham Collection. The three novels in one collection
are Sweet Danger, Traitor’s Purse and The Tiger in the Smoke. On Kindle, the price is $6.99 – and that’s
impossible to beat for an introduction to a great mystery writer.
All three are
Albert Campion mysteries, spread across a period of about 20 years. They not
only show the range of Allingham’s writing but how she developed as a writer.
In Sweet Danger (1933), the story begins
rather improbably, with Campion posing in the French Riviera as the king of a
previously-unheard-of country called Averna in the Balkans. A return to England
is in order – Campion is on the trail of three artifacts that will establish an
impoverished family as the rightful heirs of the kingdom and an estate in
England. A big financier is also on the trail, employing a few thugs to help
him out. At stake is the balance of power in Europe. In this story, Allingham introduces
Amanda Fitton, a young girl who fixes cars, repairs windmills, develops applications
for electricity, and is destined to become Campion’s wife.
In Traitor’s Purse (1941), England is at
war, and Campion from the beginning of the story finds himself suffering from
amnesia after an attack. He awakens in an hospital and doesn’t know who he is
or recognize anyone around him. He overhears a conversation that seems to
threaten him, and he makes good his escape, with the help of a girl he doesn’t recognize
driving by in a car. The girl is Amanda, and she becomes they key to helping
him return to his rightful mental self. All he knows is that something awful is
afoot, with the capacity to destroy the country, and he has to find his way out
of amnesia before it’s too late.
Margery Allingham in the 1930s
In The Tiger in the Smoke (1952), a thick
fog enveloping London is not helping Campion or the police to find out why a
young woman’s dead husband – killed during World War II – is suddenly being
photographed in London. The young woman is part of Campion’s extended family,
which by this time includes his wife Amanda and their young son Rupert. The
story involves elements of London’s underworld, whose speech is captured so
well by Allingham that it rivals Charles Dickens at his best. Allingham
combines romance, religion, post-World War II social issues in a finely crafted
story that goes beyond the mystery genre. It’s a good mystery but a wonderful
novel.
The three novels
in one collection is a wonderful introduction to one o Britain’s best mystery
writers from the Golden Age. That they still compel interest today testifies to
her appeal beyond the time in which she lived and wrote. In 1989-1990, an Albert Campion television series based on several of Allingham’s novels was aired in Britain. It starred Peter Davison as Albert Campion and and Brian Glover as his personal servant, chauffeur, bodyguard and occasional criminal, Magersfontein Lugg (Lugg is one of the great creations of 20th century mystery writing). This is the trailer for each episode’s introduction (we recently watched it on Netflix).
Top photograph: the "Killer Fog" in London in 1952, an actual occurrence in which hundreds of people died.
