Margery Allingham introduced her popular Golden Age sleuth Albert Campion as a minor character in The Crime at Black Dudley all the way back in 1929. Mr. Campion's latest incarnation, Mr. Campion's Abdication, will appear from Severn House publishers later this Fall, some 88 years after Campion's first appearance. Campion's character has matured from Allingham's books to those completed after her death by her husband, Philip Youngman Carter, and then to his appearances in new books by Mike Ripley, who began with a fragment left incomplete by Carter when he died. It's been a long journey - but the character quite obviously and deservedly remains popular. I'm particularly fond of some of the Campion books, and my favorite remains Flowers for the Judge, originally published in 1936. I think it's worth repeating my original podcast review, which has been edited to update things a bit:
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On a beautiful morning in 1911, Tom Barnabas, a director of the publishing firm Barnabas and Company, left his London house and walked down the street. Somewhere along that street, before he reached the tobacconist’s shop on the corner, he disappeared. His disappearance was never explained – or solved. Twenty years later, another director of the firm disappears. This time, however, he will reappear – very dead. His family turns to Albert Campion for help in Flowers for the Judge, by Margery Allingham.
Flowers for the Judge was published in 1936, and it was the seventh of Margery Allingham’s novels to feature Albert Campion. In past podcasts, I have reviewed a couple of her earlier novels, noting that they were really more action stories than detective novels. Flowers for the Judge is different. Allingham’s writing is more mature – and Mr. Campion seems more mature, abandoning a great deal of the regrettable fatuity that makes up his character in the early novels.
Campion is called into this case quite early – after the disappearance but before the body is discovered. When it is found, suspicion and a great deal of circumstantial evidence points at the victim’s cousin, a young man who is clearly in love with the victim’s widow. The cousin, Mike Wedgwood, is arrested, and the police are quite satisfied.
Mr. Campion is not, nor are other members of the family, including Gina, the victim’s widow. And so Mr. Campion must try to figure out what really happened: why was the victim, Paul Brande, murdered – and why? Campion also suspects, without much evidence, that there must be some link to that unsolved disappearance of Tom Barnabas twenty years earlier.
While that, in a nutshell, gives you some idea of the course the story will take, it tells you very little, really, about the book. As I noted earlier, this is certainly a detective story, and Mr. Campion does a fair amount of sleuthing. But it is also a love story – in several ways. And Margery Allingham, as she gained skill as a storyteller and author, was also moving to a much closer examination of her characters, and learning how to paint their personalities and emotions and make them an intricate part of the story.
Let me give you a couple of examples of the flashes of insight provided by Allingham to help the reader better understand the characters.
In describing one of the Barnabas cousins, a man named Ritchie Barnabas – who is the brother of the man who disappeared so mysteriously 20 years earlier and remains something of an outsider in his own family – Allingham says:
Like some thin and dusty ghost he was often seen on the stairs of the office, in the hall, or tramping home with long flapping strides through the network of gusty streets between the sacred cul-de-sac and his lodgings in Red Lion Square. No one considered him and yet everyone liked him in the half-tolerant, half-condescending way with which one regards someone else’s inoffensive pet. Every year he was granted three weeks’ holiday, and on these occasions he was never missed.
Or consider this description of a particularly unattractive young man, who works at the publishing office, and becomes a significant witness in the case. Allingham describes him this way:
Mr. Rigget had been waiting to get into the heart of the excitement downstairs ever since his sensitive perceptions had got wind of it less than three minutes after the discovery of the body, for it was a tragic fact that, in spite of his struggles against his destiny, Mr. Rigget remained what he had been born and reared to be, an inquisitive, timid, dishonorable person with a passion for self-aggrandizement which was almost a mania.
I think those two excerpts give you some taste for Allingham’s writing style and her wit. I would stress her skill in creating and presenting the characters, the settings and the situations. She is sharp and biting, but also warm and compassionate, particularly in dealing with one of the love stories in this book.
Flowers for the Judge is a beautifully written novel, in addition to being a fine mystery. The reader is presented with the occasional clue – sometimes it may appear to be an irrelevant character detail, but there is little irrelevant in this book. And I have to say that the closing chapter is beautifully and brilliantly written – with a final sentence to the book which is simply perfection. You’ll have to read it to see what I mean.
Margery Allingham’s novels are available from a number of sources, and Flowers for the Judge appears to be back in print again; a number of second-hand dealers also seem to have inexpensive copies available. It’s a fine introduction to her more mature and sophisticated novels, and Campion is marvelous here, as are the other characters. Give it a try.
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To listen to the original podcast review, please click here.
Next week: The Mystery of the Yellow Room, by Gaston Leroux.
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