Margery Allingham
POLICE AT THE FUNERAL
256pp. 978 0 09 950734 5
MORE WORK FOR THE UNDERTAKER
265pp. 978 0 09 950607 2
THE BECKONING LADY
244pp. 978 0 9506080 9
Vintage. Paperback, £6.99 each.
Thirty-seven years of critical success and transatlantic popularity (her husband, the illustrator Philip Youngman Carter, completed and published Cargo of Eagles after her death in 1966) place Margery Allingham alongside Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers in the first rank of English literary detection. The vogue for the sleuth-flâneur (Allingham’s Albert Campion, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey) in the first half of the twentieth century has encouraged recent attempts to map the rise of British detective fiction, and its subsequent love affair with the thriller, onto the shifts in national morale precipitated by international conflict. One train of thought, for instance, suggests that the genre provides nameable, explicable corpses to mourn, after the senseless obliterations of the First World War; another, that its insistence on evidence, reason and proof is democracy’s response to the threat of totalitarianism. What such accounts have in common is an assumption that detective fiction displaces otherwise terrifying and inarticulable questions about history, agency and accountability into the register of the local, the personal and the jurisprudential, wherein to articulate them in the correct way is practically to resolve them. According to this broad-brush way of thinking, the personality and history of the detective are irrelevant to his or her “function” in the reading experience.
Fans of Allingham, by contrast, are obsessed with Albert Campion’s background and identity, and invest deeply in the conceit of a discernible and self-consistent career for their effete and enigmatic hero. Websites and newsletters tirelessly compile biographies based on fleeting details from across the oeuvre. Teased, it should be said, by self-consciously solemn debates between his indulgent “biographer” and her readers in Strand magazine, Campion aficionados calculate and speculate: What is his real name? Exactly how many of his uncles are bishops? How many brothers stand between him and the family title of viscount? How old is his son in The Beckoning Lady? This biographical appetite is further fuelled by the chronicle structure of the Campion corpus.
Born in 1900 and hence, by a convenient mnemonic, reliably as old as the century, he typically engages with events set in or just months before the present of publication. For his first readers, therefore, he aged over time; encountered in order of appearance, his adventures, acquaintances and achievements can still be experienced as both sequential and cumulative. All this lends him some of the verisimilitude of a soap-opera character with whom one feels continuously familiar and who ages at the same rate as oneself. Moreover, many of Campion’s clients are, and most of the mysteries involve, his immediate peers: Campionology consists of a dense circuitry of “nods and hints and mysterious understandings” among “people who trusted each other because they were or were not related, or had been to school or served in a ship or a regiment together” (The Beckoning Lady). The web of intimacy reinforces the sense that the reader is observing a specific cohort of old boys getting older together.
Born four years after her creation, Allingham had her own, persuasive, explanation for Campion’s appeal. In The Oaken Heart (1941), her memoir of East Anglian village life in the early months of the Second World War, she probed the mental and moral horizons of her own – and Campion’s – generation. In their childhood and teens during the First World War, they remember war as a condition they inhabited: a condition which thus “was life” but “meant death”. Their immediate elders and potential mentors were radically depleted by war, and their parents, morally eviscerated by a conflict they had failed to understand or prevent, were plunged into self-disgust and unwilling either to offer precept or affirm principle. The rising generation, set loose in a “sea of muddles and unsatisfying things”, was given “the doorkey and the freedom of a shambles”. Where the first war had “set a seal of youth” on them, rendering them then and thenceforth a shade too young to tackle any situation, the Second World War found them suddenly and nonplussedly too old. Unlike their seniors, Allingham and her friends were not disillusioned: they had never had any illusions to lose. This autobiographical analysis of the post-war generation is echoed in the Campion thriller Traitor’s Purse, published in the same year as The Oaken Heart. “His was the age which had never known illusion, the grimly humorous generation which had both expected and experienced the seamier side.” For our purposes, the key result of this anomie is an empirical cast of mind: “the whole generation has had to find out how to live by trial and error, with the main result that it has learnt what little it does know very thoroughly indeed” (The Oaken Heart).
Thin, bespectacled and emphatically blank of visage (his repertoire of facial expressions – inane, fatuous, vacuous, vacant, foolish – are synonyms in Allinghamese for “reserving judgement”), Campion picks his way non-committally across corpse-strewn landscapes, sniffing the air not for blood but for scruples and squabbles and unattended tics. His gift, or his curse, is to apprehend the world without prejudice or certainty: a “scratch” epistemology that enables him, while suffering from amnesia in Traitor’s Purse, to foil a criminal mastermind and save the wartime economy from bankruptcy.
The latest additions to the Vintage reprint of Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion series, which now has made available again eleven of the eighteen novels, span twenty-four years of his career as a private detective. They take him from energetic, if somewhat fogeyish young adulthood in Police at the Funeral (1931), through marriage, fatherhood and failed attempts to enter the Establishment in More Work for the Undertaker (1949), to the self-doubting late-middle age of The Beckoning Lady (1955): “Has it ever occurred to you that I don’t do anything that the police couldn’t handle rather better?” he asks of the preternaturally vigorous young DCI Charles Luke. Shifts in tone and theme emerge too. All Allingham’s detective novels are elaborate ensemble productions, with the genre’s extravagant dramatis personae and largesse of characterization.
But whereas Allingham’s earlier works swelter under concert-party lights, rarely deviating, even at their most bloodthirsty, from a jaunty Cluedo-ish idiom – could it be “Poppy in the middle of the night in a cornfield with a dagger” (The Case of the Late Pig)? Was the weapon “a length of lead pipe, possibly stocking covered” (Traitor’s Purse)? “Surely Uncle Andrew didn’t go to church with a coil of rope, a revolver and a clock weight concealed upon him?” (Police at the Funeral) – the later novels revolve around recognizably modern, even prosaic, concerns. Indeed, they have some very twenty-first-century preoccupations: pensions, tax allowances, inheritance law and the fate of the “New Useless” – the “generation which would die of want and neglect” because “the young would be too overworked to look after them” (The Beckoning Lady).
Structurally, the earlier two books are remarkably similar. Both concern two suspicious deaths among the surviving scions of academic families: the Cambridge Faradays and the London Palinodes. In both cases, a handful of assorted sons and daughters, all now themselves elderly, plus a sexy orphaned niece of the next generation, inhabit the Victorian townhouses of their eminent fathers’ glory days. All are now impoverished, having squandered their personal inheritances by speculation on horses, shares, or both; they have a “genius for finance in reverse” (More Work for the Undertaker). All have been more or less infantilized by dependency on a matriarch who holds the purse-strings and who struggles to keep scandal at bay. All are hopeless, disconnected from modernity, sheltered from its demands by the traditional deference of local tradesmen and household menials. “When the world goes thud”, Campion observes of the Palinodes, “they put their heads back in a book.” Both households invite Campion to take up residence, to make sure no one gets hanged by mistake, and to act as a buffer and interpreter between themselves and the police. Herein lies the raison d’être of the “golden age” sleuth. Scotland Yard may be “very spry these days” (Mystery Mile), it may even be “practically inescap-able” (Police at the Funeral). But policing, with its specialisms and systems, is thwarted by murder. “A dull, routine job, this tracking of criminals”, observes Inspector Oates wistfully. “Murderers are the most unsatisfactory of the lot. Nine times out of ten you’ve got no past record to go on. What’s the good of your beautiful filing system then?” “I don’t think”, he remarks bitterly; “I gave that up when I discovered the mess it gets one into.” As private detective or, as he prefers to be known, “adventurer”, Campion is one of those “lucky fellows on the outside . . . who can enjoy the luxuries of conjecture”.
The problem for the police is compounded when murder takes place, as it invariably does, among the overeducated upper classes, the “difficult interesting people”. Despite his extensive underworld contacts and shady reputation, Campion’s world is the one most opaque to the police: the cosmopolis of the intellectual, the innovator, the emancipated entrepreneuse, or the reckless genius. Campion gives the police (and the reader) privileged access to this otherwise exotic, alien clan: “It’s navvies, whizz-boys, car thieves, small tradespeople who run off the rails and commit murder, and I can talk to them”, complains Oates. “These people are more difficult. I don’t see how their minds work. Even the words they use don’t mean the same”; “If it was only a foreign language I’d get an interpreter”, grumbles Charlie Luke in More Work for the Undertaker.
There, however, the similarities end. The narratives spiral off in wildly different directions: serial murder and blackmail are the mere bread and butter to which smuggling, suicide and theft are liberally, even gratu-itously, superadded, along with a good stiff punch-up here and a car chase with a horsedrawn coffin there. Will the villain turn out to be the dapper bank manager Mr Henry James, or Joseph Congreve, his creepy clerk? Mr Bowels the sweaty undertaker? Or Miss Jessica Palinode, who wears a cardboard hat and does crossword puzzles in Latin? Poised improbably on the threshold between an Ealing comedy and film noir, the typical Campion plot is darkly bonkers and in the end probably not worth the candle. There is always a whiff of daftness around, always the possibility that the “silliest blessed story may be true”.
For the pleasures of the narrative are seldom to do with discovering who done it or why (Allingham’s nods to criminal psychology are cursory at best); rather they are adventures in habitat. Though Campion and his lugubrious manservant, Lugg, see themselves as resolutely metropolitan, Allingham’s own preferred scale is that of the hamlet; even London is a tessellation of self-contained villages thrown together by coincidence. Whether, as here, the locale is some variant of second-generation “town-gown”, or the publishing house (Flowers for the Judge), the fashion house (The Fashion for Shrouds), or the country estate, the human fauna of each social ecosystem are observed and recorded in all their grotesque profusion. Each has its definite culture and climate and range of social weather, and each throws up individualities and kinships that are sketched with an affection that is both discriminating and promiscuous.
For Allingham’s strength is in the evocation of atmosphere: this is in part a question of characters and their recombination, but just as crucially of carpets and curtains, furniture and light and smell. The Faradays’ overbearing Victorian townhouse, for instance, feels like being “inside a huge tea-cosy with something unclean”. The Palinode residence, by contrast, is a sprawling accidental sort of place, “designed in pitch-pine by someone who was getting back to simplicity but not all at once”. The unmistakable difference in atmosphere infects and inflects the ways in which the two families enact their insularity. Unworldliness, after all, can be a virtue or a vice. Whereas impracticality in one family has its own expansive inventiveness – a richly theoretical incompetence – in the other it is corrosive: short-sighted ingenuity vitiated by envy and bile. Both books, in other words, ring the changes on genteel uselessness, but across vividly differentiated moral milieux. Either way, however, detachment spells danger: “I don’t like real innocence, do you Albert?”, comments Renee Roper, theatrical landlady and benefactress of the Palinodes; “You never feel safe with it.”
