One morning, a prominent member of a publishing family leaves his London home, walks down the street, and quite literally vanishes before reaching the corner. Despite a thorough investigation, nobody seems to be able to determine what happened. Twenty years later, another member of the same family vanishes - but this time his body turns up, quite dead, in the basement of the publishing office.
That's the opening situation in Margery Allingham's "Flowers for the Judge," a classic Golden Age mystery featuring her detective, Albert Campion, and the subject of this week's podcast. It is one of my favorite Allingham novels. Campion, for once, loses much of his grating fatuity and is both human and remarkably intelligent. Also, while some of the earlier Campion novels were more adventure stories than mysteries, this is a classic "play-fair" mystery story, with clues provided for the alert reader to follow. I think it is also one of the best-written of her mysteries, with a particularly well-done ending.
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