Margery Allingham is generally considered to be one of the "Crime Queens" whose mysteries helped to define what we now consider to have been the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. Her amateur detective, Albert Campion, after beginning life as a minor character in her first book, The Crime at Black Dudley, quickly became the star performer in Allingham's later fiction. He appears in more than a dozen novels and a fair number of short stories. Collections of those short stories were released both during the author's lifetime and after her death. The last of those collections, The Return of Mr. Campion, was released in 1989. That collection has now been re-published by Agora Books, and it is the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, which you can hear by clicking here. The publisher has made a copy available to me for this review.
There are 13 stories in this collection – the new edition from Agora Books also includes another story, called “Tall Story,” which originally appeared in a different collection. Albert Campion appears in roughly half of the stories. The others are an eclectic group of tales, generally written when Allingham was quite young. They are all fairly interesting reads, although not all would qualify as mysteries. There are a couple of supernatural stories, one of which may prove offensive to some modern readers because of its racial overtones. There’s a romance or two as well. Curiously for a crime fiction book, there are no murders involved, although a couple of the Campion stories do deal quite well with espionage and blackmail. It should also be said that a couple of the stories in which Mr. Campion DOES appear are really anecdotes rather than stories, written (in earlier years) by Margery Allingham as an introduction to her detective. There are even cameo appearances from Campion's valet, assistant and general factotum, Magersfontein Lugg, as well as from two of Mr. Campion’s closest associates among the police, Stanislaus Oates and Charlie Luke.
On the whole, readers interested in learning more about Mr. Campion and also interested in seeing some very early writing by his creator, Margery Allingham, are likely to enjoy The Return of Mr. Campion.
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