Strange doings in the English town of Lindsay Carfax, a remarkably commercial little town with a large tourist trade. It is a town where people who may seem "out of place" find themselves suddenly accident prone. Sometimes those people disappear for a while. And sometimes worse things may happen...
Into this town comes the elderly Mr. Albert Campion, concerned because of an apparent attack on his wife's niece. What he finds there is told in Mr Campion's Farewell
First, a few words about this book, and why I think it warrants being reviewed as a "classic" mystery. Generally regarded as one of the great "crime queen" writers of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, Margery Allingham created the character of Albert Campion in 1929. He began as a rather foppish, outwardly foolish but really quite intelligent young man, and he matured over the course of many novels and short stories.
When Allingham died in 1966, her husband, Philip ("Pip") Youngman Carter completed the Campion novel on which his wife had been working, Cargo of Eagles. Carter went on to write two additional Campion books before he died in 1969. He left behind four chapters of another book featuring Albert Campion - but no plot outline, or any kind of summary or indication of what kind of story he had had in mind. After many years, those chapters wound up in the hands of the Margery Allingham Society - and they eventually invited British author Mike Ripley to try his hand at finishing Carter's last book. The result is the brand-new Mr. Campion's Farewell, and it fits quite well into the Campion saga.
The story is set in the village of Lindsay Carfax, a place where tourists are more than welcome to come, wander the town, visit local museums and somewhat doubtful historic sites, and – to be sure – spend a lot of money buying souvenirs. That is the way the town likes it. That is the way the people who may run the town want it – a secretive group of nine people called the Carders – a group which may or not actually exist. But people who don’t fit in – say, a band of what were then called "hippies" – are unwelcome, and bad things may happen to them; in fact, a couple of them died quite recently from apparent drug overdoses. People who go against the grain sometimes disappear – always for a period of nine days – and, when they reappear, they have nothing to say about where they have been or what may have happened, or the occasional bruises they exhibit. And they no longer seem as inclined to cause what the Carders and other townspeople might consider “trouble.” As one character puts it, “We’ve been a carefully preserved gold mine for at least seventy years and it has never paid anyone to step out of line. People who do become accident-prone.”
When a booby-trapped staircase nearly causes the death of Campion's wife's niece, he agrees to visit the village to investigate the odd events there. What he finds is a series of mysterious events - many involving the number nine - and at least a couple of murders.
Mike Ripley has done a fine job taking these plot twists and adding new ones of his own. Because Albert Campion is one of the few fictional detectives who apparently aged and matured in the course of their books, the inevitable changes in Campion's character, caused by the fact that different authors have contributed to the character's development, play quite well and do not jar. I think fans of the original Campion novels - including the Youngman Carter books - will welcome Campion's return under the excellent guidance of Mike Ripley, who brings his own considerable wit and good humor to bear on this story. The publishers provided me with an electronic version of the book for review, and I heartily recommend it.