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Tag Archives: Margery Allingham

Hide My Eyes

07 Saturday Sep 2019

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books

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Margery Allingham

One of the things I find interesting about Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion novels is that Campion ages more or less in real time. The pre-war Campion of Mystery Mile, Look to the Lady and Sweet Danger is sleek, fast, adventurous, insouciant. The post-war Campion is married, settled, more given to thought than action. Lugg starts to disappear from the stories; and his police contact, Stanislaw Oates, is promoted and replaced by Charlie Luke. Time passes, things change.

hide my eyesAnd the nature of the stories changes with the aging of the characters. Tiger in the Smoke, generally reckoned to be the best of the post-war Campion novels, is a haunting and atmospheric story of a darkly evil person emerging out of the London fog. But having just read Hide My Eyes, I’d venture to suggest that it is even better.

Though it is hardly an Albert Campion novel at all. Campion is there, making sporadic appearances throughout the text, adding a couple of hunches and a couple of deductions to the inspired detective work of Charlie Luke; but the detection is really no more than the background to a much more interesting story, and Campion and Luke are little more than peripheral figures.

At the heart of the novel is Gerry Hawker, though that is only one of the names he goes by. In part he is an affable rogue who charms everyone he meets; all his contacts are sure he is into something illegal, but he is so affable that none of them can believe it is anything really serious. Even when they encounter evidence to suggest otherwise, they dismiss it, put it out of their minds. But Gerry is also an amoral murderer who, by the end of the novel, has killed ten people. He is modelled, at least in part, on John Haigh, the so-called “Acid Bath Murderer”, executed in 1949, and whose case is referenced several times during the novel. Like Haigh, Gerry is a thief and swindler who believes that once you have taken everything else from your victim, you might as well take their life, and he is so careful and so charming that he gets away with it.

The portrait of Gerry as it develops throughout the novel is chilling and powerful. And though we see his carefree competence begin to unravel, there is still no reason to suppose that he won’t carry on getting away with it. Which is what makes the novel so compelling. This never pretends to be a whodunit, we know that he is guilty, that he is vile and dangerous, right from the start, but as we follow him throughout the one day in which the story happens he remains absolutely fascinating. Gaps and contradictions and errors in his story arise repeatedly, but he seems to sweep them aside effortlessly, and those who are with him, and indeed those who are tracking him, never see enough of the story to be able to recognise these contradictions for what they are.

In contrast to Gerry there is Polly Tassie, a gentle old woman who runs a small private museum devoted to the oddities her late husband had collected throughout his life. She and her husband had befriended Gerry years before, and he now uses her home and museum as an irregular base of operations. She knows that Gerry is a wrong-un, she has even discovered that he has stolen money from her and so has asked a lawyer friend to confront him and get the money back (which results in the lawyer’s death), but she cannot believe his is a serious villain. To believe as much would be to undermine everything that she and her late husband have held dear. Rather, she thinks that Gerry just needs to settle down with a good woman, and has invited the daughter of a cousin to visit in the hope of engineering a match.

Instead, this visit is the beginning of the end for Gerry, because Annabelle has an admirer, who spots Gerry leaving Polly’s home and so determines to find out who he is. As a result he finds himself being swept along with Gerry from place to place, witnessing his brazen lies and equivocations, and slowly coming to realise that he is being set up by Gerry as an alibi for a crime he is planning to commit. Richard provides the viewpoint that allows us to contrast what we know of Gerry with what everyone else sees in him.

One of the other people fooled by Gerry’s lies is the proprietor of a Soho drinking club that, in its layout and its character, reminded me irresistibly of the old Troy Club which I visited a few times. And that is another aspect of the book that fascinated me: the glimpses of a lived-in, worn-out, run-down London as it was when the book came out in 1958. The character of a cafe where the proprietor cat behind a raised counter by the entrance where she could survey her domain; the glimpse of London buses that were grimmer and more essential than they are today; the way street life is carried on. The novel turns out to be an extraordinary window into the past, far more so than is usually the case in Allingham’s novels which are often set in their own peculiar little private universe.

Most of Allingham’s novels I have found satisfying and engaging, but this has a psychological and a descriptive heft that makes it one of her very finest books.

Cargo of Eagles

13 Sunday May 2018

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Margery Allingham, Youngman Carter

I’m doing some fairly intense research reading at the moment, so I’m interspersing it with something a little lighter for relaxation. As part of that, I’ve just settled into another jag of reading Margery Allingham. First up, because I’m reading these books in no particular order, is Cargo of Eagles, which also happens to be her last book. Or rather, it was the novel she left unfinished when she died in 1966; it was finished by her husband, Youngman Carter, and published in 1968. I believe there were a couple of later books entirely written by Carter, though I’m not sure if these were based on incomplete manuscripts or outlines that Allingham had left.

Cargo of EaglesWhen you know that about a book going in, you find yourself inevitably looking for the join, and in this case I couldn’t spot it. Or rather, there are a number of possibilities, but nothing definite. For a start this is, in any case, late Allingham, and she had by this point gone off the boil somewhat. Campion had grown older (she always set her stories in the present, rather than the past, so she couldn’t revisit early episodes in his career), by now he should be well past retirement age. The closest she comes to acknowledging this is that he is absent for a large part of the story, and the focus is on a younger surrogate, Morty Kelsey. By trying to be contemporary, she makes part of the story about Mods and Rockers, though she doesn’t really get what they were about, and anyway, even in 1968 when the book finally appeared, they must have seemed old hat. And the ending feels both clunky and rushed, as though Campion knew the secret all along, in which case there was no need for the whole fol-de-rol of the story; but then, I’ve felt pretty much the same about other lateish works that I’ve read.

But put that aside, this is another of those little pocket universes that she created throughout her career, as in Traitor’s Purse, for instance, or More Work for the Undertaker. In other words it is a little bit of England that seems to be emotionally and culturally cut off from the rest of the country, the rest of the modern world. In this instance it is Saltey, a little bit of coastal marshland in Essex that isn’t on the way to anywhere. It was once the haunt of smugglers, and still carries on the practice; there’s a local myth of a demon that once caused mayhem throughout the village, and everyone is still happy to carry on believing it; and the families recorded in a centuries-old map are still the prominent families of the area, who have intermarried and and maintained their own particular secrets and rivalries down all the years. This is prime Allingham territory, where the particularities of place tend to outweigh the necessities of contemporary realism.

Into this individual setting, Allingham introduces buried treasure, a famous thief who has just got out of prison after 20 years, a mysterious thug who was once the accomplice of the thief and now seems to be back in the area, poison pen letters, a couple of murders, Mods and Rockers creating mayhem, an unlikely bequest, and Albert Campion on a mission for a shadowy secret service outfit. It all ties together, just about, though to say the pudding had been over-egged would be to underplay quite how much she tries to cram into the plot. And Campion is here more shadowy, less distinct a character than he had been in earlier books, as if Allingham has trouble picturing her aging hero in this particular milieu. Though the magnificent Lugg, more ancient even that Campion though you wouldn’t know it, remains as sharp and vivid as ever.

Yet for what I wanted, it was exactly right. A book I finished in a day, which is practically unheard of for me.

2017 in Review

31 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books

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Anthony Gottlieb, Arthur C Clarke, Becky Chambers, Benjamin Black, books of the year, Bruce Sterling, C.J. Sansom, China Mieville, Christopher Priest, Colin Greenland, Dave Hutchinson, Edmund Crispin, Emma Chambers, Emma Newman, Gerry Canavan, Gwyneth Jones, Helen MacInnes, Iain Banks, Iain R. MacLeod, Joanna Kavenna, John Banville, John Crowley, John Kessel, John Le Carre, Judith A. Barter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Laurent Binet, Laurie Penny, Lavie Tidhar, Lily Brooks-Dalton, m john harrison, Margery Allingham, Mark Fisher, Matt Ruff, Michael Chabon, nina allan, Octavia Butler, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Paul Auster, Paul Nash, Rick Wilber, Rob Latham, Steve Erickson, Stuart Jeffries, Tade Thompson, Tricia Sullivan, Ursula K. Le Guin, Yoon Ha Lee

It’s that time of year again, when I dust off this oft-forgotten blog and post a list of my reading through the year, along with other odd comments.

2017 has been, in some respects, a very good year. My first full-length book not composed of previously published material, appeared in May. Iain M. Banks appeared in the series Modern Masters of Science Fiction from Illinois University Press, and has received some generally positive reviews, much to my relief.

Also this year I signed a contract with Gylphi to write a book about Christopher Priest, which is likely to take most if not all of the next year. In addition, I’ve put in a proposal for another volume in the Modern Masters of Science Fiction; the initial response has been quite good so I’m hoping I’ll have more to report in the new year. So, in work terms, it looks like the next couple of years are pretty much taken care of. Continue reading →

The Fashion in Shrouds

27 Monday Jun 2016

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books, Uncategorized

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Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham

It was pure chance that made me pick The Fashion in Shrouds by Margery Allingham off the shelf so soon after reading Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers. But that chance led me to read Allingham’s 1938 novel as in some way a response to Sayers’s 1935 novel. Continue reading →

More Work for the Undertaker

14 Monday Sep 2015

Posted by Paul Kincaid in Uncategorized

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Agatha Christie, Charles Dickens, Dorothy L. Sayers, Helen MacInnes, Margery Allingham

Immediately upon finishing the Helen MacInnes, I came down with some sort of bug and ended up spending yesterday in bed. So I picked another old book off the shelf. This time it was More Work for the Undertaker by Margery Allingham. I finished it in less than two days, which either tells you how sick I was or how compelling the book is, or possibly both. Continue reading →

Traitor’s Purse

26 Friday Sep 2014

Posted by Paul Kincaid in Uncategorized

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Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Benjamin Black, Dorothy L. Sayers, Leslie Charteris, M.R. James, Margery Allingham

allinghamWhile I’m on the subject of crime fiction, I’ve also been reading another Margery Allingham novel. Continue reading →

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