1931 classic English detective fiction; fourth of Allingham's novels
of Albert Campion. The very elderly Caroline Faraday has a house in
Cambridge run on strict Victorian lines; her ageing son, daughters and
nephew put up with the lack of freedom for the free bed and board,
having variously failed at their own lives. But everyone's fairly
horrible, and it seems that one of them is also a murderer.
Early in the book, Campion muses:
As far as he could see, really attractive characters in this affair
were going to be scarce, and it was delightful to find one at the
breakfast-table so unexpectedly on the first morning of his arrival.
and sure enough that's what you're going to get here. Like some of
Agatha Christie's later mysteries, anyone could have dunnit, and
nobody is particularly pleasant, so you won't mind if it turns out to
be them. Campion spends much of his time in the house with the ghastly
people, thus having nobody to play off, and there's no Lugg at all.
The Cambridge setting is largely wasted apart from a desire to get
things sorted out before the students come back,
On the other hand, where Allingham's previous mysteries have been
fairly thin and conventional, if anything mostly there to supply
necessary form for the character studies that seem to have been her
early priority, this one gives you a full-blown and distinctly
challenging detective story (i.e. I didn't work out the guilty party's
identity before the revelation) as well as the character studies. It
probably helps that organised crime is no longer a plot element, since
"who's working for the known bad guys" is replaced by the more
interesting "who is a bad guy in his/her own right, and for what
reasons".
Everything feels a bit stagey, to the extent that even Inspector Oates
remarks upon the "conjuring trick" that seems to have been pulled
(i.e. that the circumstantial evidence, like the woman apparently cut
in two on stage, seems to have been carefully set up and is going to
end up indicating something entirely different from what it appears
to). There's even an actual honest locked-room mystery! The sudden
appearance of a massive bare footprint in a flower-bed, far too big to
belong to any of the inmates of the house, feels like an explicit
attempt at misdirection.
"She clung to life as though she had ever got anything out of it,
poor creature."
It's all a bit grim and baroque, so don't go into this expecting a
conventional Golden Age mystery; but if you're willing to immerse
yourself in pettiness and hatred, this is the book for you. Followed
by Sweet Danger.
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