Police at the Funeral (Albert Campion #4), Margery Allingham. New York: Open Road Media, 2023 (Originally published in 1931).

Summary: A request to find a missing uncle turns into a multiple murder investigation in an unhappy Cambridge manor.

Campion has a meeting with the fiancee of an old friend in a secluded location called the Sanctuary when he encounters Inspector Stanislaus Oakes. Oakes is trying to elude someone who is following him. The young woman, Joyce Blount, has seen and knows him but won’t say who it is. Turns out she has a reason. Her uncle, Andrew Faraday, is missing. Her fiance, Marcus Featherstone, a friend of Campion, is Andrew’s solicitor. They want someone with Campion’s skills to help find him.

Campion arrives at Socrates Close, the family manor, to learn that Andrew has been found by two students–dead. Floating in the river, legs and hands bound, his head blown off with a bullet between the eyes. Inspector Oakes joins the investigation.

It turns out Andrew was a black sheep, a gambler, erratic and disliked by the family, including his brother William, his sister Julia, and Great Aunt Caroline, a formidable old woman who heads the household. Then, there is the man who had followed Oates, Cousin George Faraday, whereabouts unknown. Great Aunt Caroline immediately takes a liking to Campion and hires him to investigate the death.

Death soon becomes deaths. Aunt Julia dies the next morning after her morning tea. It’s poison. Suspicion, at least for Andrew’s death, falls on William. He was the last with Andrew, walking home from church with him, parting when Andrew went the long way home. But William also was late getting back and can’t account for the time due to amnesia, which he claims he has seen a doctor for. But his service revolver is missing, as is some as well as some cord from a window pull.

More bizarre things happen. William is wounded and faints from what looks like a knife wound. He recovers but Campion suspects more poison, just not enough. A huge barefoot footprint appears in a bed outside the house and a giant “B” appears on a window. Then George appears, has a conference with Caroline, and takes over the house. He has something on her, connected with Andrew’s death. The next morning, he’s dead–cyanide poisoning.

Both Oates and Campion keep searching for who could be responsible for all these deaths. Then the answer comes in an overnight fight between Campion and the barefoot stalker…

It’s fascinating to see the tie between Great Aunt Caroline and Campion. It seems to come down to discretion toward an old, if not particularly attractive family. Likewise with William under a cloud of suspicion. Under Campion’s eccentricity, there is a certain decency. But will it mislead him and endanger his own life in a house where everyone under the roof seems to be coming to an early death?

Look to the Lady (Albert Campion #3), Margery Allingham. New York: Open Road Media, 2023 (Originally published in 1931).

Summary: Albert Campion assists the Gyrth family in protecting a priceless chalice in the family for hundreds of years against an international theft ring focused on creating private collections of priceless treasures.

The male heir of a landed family, the Gyrths, is estranged from his father and wandering London’s streets when Campion finds him. Campion is on an urgent mission. For generations, the Gyrths have guarded a silver chalice. Their grant of the land depends on keeping the chalice secure. Campion has learned that an international group of thieves is seeking the chalice. This group has a peculiar set of rules by which they play. They steal for one another’s private art collections. And if the particular thief tasked with stealing a treasure is caught or dies, they cease their efforts in stealing that object.

Campion and the young man, Val Gyrth return to his father’s estate, close on his 25th birthday, when he is to engage in the ritual of the secret room. Meanwhile, his Aunt Di has been acting as the Keeper of the Chalice and has been showing it to a pack of guests. Then she turns up dead in a nearby forest, looking frightened out of her wits. Curiously, her body is laid out as if for burial, yet the death is ruled as due to a bad heart. Through Campion’s foresight, he protects the chalice that had been left unguarded in Aunt Di’s cottage.

Allingham creates a delightfully twisty plot involving a monster roaming the forest, an old witch and her mentally impaired son, a band of gypsies, a chase with Val’s sister Penny, Val and Campion trying to elude thieves seeking the chalice, a brash and rude woman who owns a nearby stable, and an American professor interested in the lore of the chalice, and his daughter Beth, who becomes Val’s romantic interest.

I won’t trace all those twists, but all these characters, and a few other minor ones as well as the faithful Lugg play a part leading up to a climactic scene at the secret room on Val’s 25th birthday. Campion’s eccentricities cover a shrewd schemer, yet as the climactic scene approaches, we find ourselves wondering if he has been too clever for his own good, and in fact he is saved only by help from an unexpected quarter. All in all, this was a delightful and diverting story, even though it pressed the limits of plausibility at points.

Mystery Mile, (Albert Campion #2), Margery Allingham. New York: Bloomsbury Reader, 2018 (originally published in 1930).

Summary: Campion is hired to protect a retired American judge investigating the Simister crime syndicate, yet even a remote coastal community is not safe from their sinister efforts.

On a cruise from America, Campion saves the life of retired Judge Crowdy Lobbett, and is subsequently hired by his son Marlowe to protect Judge Lobbett as well as his sister Isopel. The judge has been investigating the Simister gang, an international crime syndicate. There have been several attempts upon his life, and several deaths around him.

Ostensibly to protect him, they remove to a remote manor at Mystery Mile, an isolated hamlet near the coast, by some marshes that could swallow a man whole. The proprietors are young, Giles and his sister Biddy, along with faithful staff. They set up a surveillance team, the Seven Whistlers. Things don’t stay quiet for long before they receive visitors, first a fortune teller by the name of Datchett. then a pesky art dealer by the name of Barber.

And strange things start happening. The old parson is found dead, an apparent suicide. Then Judge Lobbett goes for a walk in the nearby labyrinth and goes missing. Subsequently, Biddy, running an errand at the local post office, is abducted. The group mounts a rescue operation that nearly fails but for the intervention of Campion.

Things don’t seem to be going well but both Lobbett and Campion are hoping to lure the mysterious head of the Simister gang into the open. Yet all the others who have tried to do so end up dead. Will things be any different for the crusty old judge and the eccentric Campion?

While all this unfolding, the young people are falling in love, Giles with Isopel and Marlowe with Biddy, binding this foursome together. Meanwhile, Campion emerges as more than a quirky, well-heeled young man. He’s a resourceful, out-of-the-box sleuth. But will he accomplish something multiple law enforcement agencies have failed to do?

I’m finding that the more I read of Allingham, the more I am enjoying her. It seems that her plotting is more intricate than Marsh or Christie, but I find this makes her more interesting intellectually, even as we enjoy the eccentricity and originality of Campion.

The Crime at Black Dudley (Albert Campion #1), Margery Allingham. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018 (originally published in 1929).

Summary: A house party at a remote mansion results in the death of its one reclusive resident after a “lights out” game with a 15th century dagger, followed by the party being held captive by the head of an international crime syndicate.

I’ve read extensively the works of three of the four “Queens of Crime” from the Golden Age of Mysteries–Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, and Ngaio Marsh. The fourth is Margery Allingham. I’ve only read one other of her works, More Work for the Undertaker (review), I’ve decided it’s time to read more of this lesser known, at least to me, of the “Queens.” Her sleuth, Albert Campion, likewise is less known that Lord Peter, Poirot, or Alleyn. It may be, however, that he is the most eccentric..

In this novel, he plays a minor, but not unimportant part, but it is actually the narrator, George Abbershaw, a renowned pathologist, who solves the murder part of this story. The story begins with an invitation to a group of young friends, including Abbershaw, to a house party at a forbidding old country mansion. Their host is Wyatt Petrie, the owner of the mansion, whose longstanding occupant, along with servants, is his uncle, Colonel Coombe. Abbershaw is joined by Meggie Oliphant, who ends up being thrown together with him in the subsequent adventures of the story. There are several other friends of Petrie. And then there is Campion. No one is quite sure how he got there.

There are other guests present, who turn out to be at the head of a ruthless international crime syndicate. They seem to be guests of Colonel Coombe. Campion is apprehensive, but the party proceeds with a macabre game involving a dagger passed from one party member to another while the lights are out. The point is to not be holding the dagger when the lights go on.

Much more happens when the lights go on. They learn that Colonel Coombe has had an attack, and subsequently that he is dead. This was not unexpected due to his weak heart. Abbershaw is called on to sign the death certificate but not allowed to examine the body but can only see the face. That’s enough–he knows this wasn’t a heart attack but death from a wound from which he “bled out.” But the pressure from the local doctor and those with Coombe is such that he signs, allowing the body to be cremated, destroying the evidence.

If all this isn’t enough to ruin a house party, they learn they are being held captive by the head of the syndicate, Dawlish, and his associates. They are after papers that Coombe was supposed to give them. It turns out that Campion, working for an unspecified employer, also was after the papers. No one knows where they are and the party is threatened in dire ways if they don’t surrender the papers, key to an international heist. One of the party attempting to escape to get help is wounded and worse is threatened. Eventually Abbershaw deduces from various comments, including those of a daffy old lady, that the murderer was not one of the syndicate but one of Petrie’s party.

We have two mysteries–that of the papers and that of the murderer. For a time, Campion even seems suspect of one or both. Yet he neither has papers or is the murderer. He raises some questions, and shows himself quite resourceful, including climbing down a chimney to rescue Abbershaw and Meggie at one point in the story. Otherwise, he seems a bit of an eccentric twit from upper class origins, who indulges in working as a private investigator. It appears Allingham is saving him for future stories, giving us just enough taste that we are curious for more.

The end of the story is exciting, and in the end, it is Abbershaw, with his friend, the young physician Prenderby who solve the crimes. Like the other work I reviewed, there are a number of threads, a lot of moving parts to Allingham’s story that require close reading. I have to say that I am yet to be won over but I’m willing to read more, if for no other reason than to see how Allingham develops Campion.