Mount TBR #2

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

Mr. Campion and Others – Margery Allingham

These 13 short stories star Allingham’s series PI, Albert Campion. They were first published in the UK in the late thirties and made their way in the US, through Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, during WWII.

Allingham’s family was full of professional writers, so she knew how to tell a crackerjack story. A professional, she wasn’t one to sit around waiting for the muse to alight. She churned out short stories for The Strand Magazine and Harper’s Bazaar because that was her job and there were bills to pay. But she was also professional in the sense that she cared about her craft. Without being fancy about vocabulary and grammar, she gave her writing literary qualities such as well-turned sentences and phrases with surprising twists and turns. This is the start of The Name on the Wrapper:

Mr. Albert Campion was one of those useful if at times exasperating people who remain interested in the world in general at three o’clock on a chilly winter’s morning. When he saw the overturned car, dark and unattended by the grass verge, therefore, he pulled up his own saloon and climbed out on to the road, whose frosty surface was glistening like a thousand diamonds.

I think of Dame Agatha and Sayers - and they just don’t do sentences like that. In the early novels Campion has too much Wimsey-esque goofiness, but he evolves – mercifully, to my mind - to become not quirky at all, but human and plausible. The humor often comes out of Campion’s being mildly scandalized – but never shocked – at what people will get up to. This kind of subtlety, I think, is beyond Lord Peter or Hercule.

Happily, his sidekick Oates pops up in many of the stories. This, from the beginning of The Old Man in the Window:

Newly appointed Superintendent Stanislaus Oates was by no means intoxicated, but he was cheerful, as became a man celebrating an important advance in a distinguished career, and Mr. Campion, who sat opposite him at the small table in the corner of the chop-house, surveyed the change in his usually taciturn friend with interest.

More than a few of these stories are a tad on the thin side, so readers who want more substantial fare should stick with the novels. On the other hand, this is perfect reading for airplanes, waiting rooms and other mild to moderately stressful situations.