More Work for the
Undertaker – Margery Allingham
I had to put down Stuart Kaminsky’s mystery The Fala Factor because the mood and
period touches of the 1940s didn’t work for me at all. I impatiently wondered
when the frickin’ plot was going to get any forwarder despite all the “it was a
simpler more innocent time” jazz. This quitting concerned me because for me lots
of mystery writers – Nicholas Blake, Michael Innes, to name just two –
atmosphere is the draw. If for me as a mystery reader briskness of plot trumps
atmosphere, I’m cooked.
Thank heaven for this whodunit from 1948.
Taking a page out of Dickens, Allingham describes Apron
Street. Though the blitz has left its scars, Apron Street still features street
arabs, poky shops purveying archaic products, and horse-drawn hearses.
Too, the characters are Dickensy in their comicalness and
over-the-topitude. Charlie Luke, a new young policeman, is a human dynamo. The
Palionode family, though on hard times, pursue obscure scholarly interests as
if it were still the wealthy indolent 1890s. The fawning yet sinister funeral
director Jas Bowels has the motto “Courtesy, Sympathy, Comfort in Transit.”
The suspicious death of Ruth Palinode brings in series
hero Albert Campion to investigate poison pen letters and an elaborate criminal
enterprise. The story borders on a parody of a whodunit with nutty wills, an enormous
coffin, young misunderstood lovers, shares in a defunct mine, and the
government anxious to squelch public knowledge of dodgy business.
Highly recommended. For me the professional finesse of her writing, her delicate
wit, her lively imagination put Allingham in the first rank of mystery writers.
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