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A Lagonda
16/80 featured extensively in the series. The car used in the series is now
kept in
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Campion is
a television show made by the BBC, adapting the Albert Campion mystery novels
written by Margery Allingham. Two series were made, in 1989 and 1990, starring
Peter Davison as Campion, Brian Glover as his manservant Magersfontein Lugg and
Andrew Burt as his policeman friend Stanislaus Oates.
A total of
eight novels were adapted, four in each series, each of which was originally
broadcast as two separate hour-long episodes. Peter Davison sang the title
music for the first series himself; in the second series, it was replaced with
an instrumental version.
Series 1 - 1989
"Look
to the Lady"
A mystery
surrounding an ancient chalice. Features Gordon Jackson as Professor Cairey.
Original air dates 22 and 29 January 1989.
Book first
published in 1931.
"Police
at the Funeral"
The death
of a member of a wealthy family. Features Timothy West as Uncle William
Faraday. Original air dates 5 and 12 February 1989.
Book first
published in 1931.
"The
Case of the Late Pig"
A man appears
to have died twice. Features Michael Gough as Mr Hayhoe. Original air dates 19
and 26 February 1989.
Book first
published in 1937.
"Death
of a Ghost"
A painter's
legacy leads to murder. Features Jean Anderson as Belle Lafcadio and Carole
Ruggier as Rosa . Original air dates 5 and 12
March 1989.
Book first
published in 1934.
Series 2 - 1990
"Sweet
Danger"
The
ownership of a tiny kingdom leads to a deadly treasure hunt. Features Lysette
Anthony as Amanda Fitton and David Haig as Guffy Randall. Original air dates 12
and 19 January 1990.
Book first
published in 1933.
"Dancers
in Mourning"
A series of
pranks, and worse, upset a leading theatre star and his bizarre household.
Features Ian Ogilvy as Jimmy Sutane and Pippa Guard as Linda Sutane. Original
air dates 9 and 16 February 1990.
Book first
published in 1937.
"Flowers
for the Judge"
Murder
visits a respectable London
Book first
published in 1936.
"Mystery
Mile"
Campion
must protect the family of an American judge on the trail of a sinister crime
boss. Features Lisa Orgolini as Isobel Lobbett and Miles Anderson as Anthony
Datchett. Original air dates 9 and 16 March 1990.
Book first
published in 1930.
Margery Louise Allingham (20 May 1904 – 30
June 1966) was an English writer of detective fiction, best remembered for her
"golden age" stories featuring gentleman sleuth Albert Campion.
Her breakthrough occurred in 1929 with the
publication of The Crime at Black Dudley. This introduced Albert Campion,
albeit originally as a minor character. He returned in Mystery Mile, thanks in
part to pressure from her American publishers, much taken with the character. By
now, with three novels behind her, Allingham's skills were improving, and with
a strong central character and format to work from, she began to produce a
series of popular Campion novels. At first she had to continue writing short
stories and journalism for magazines such as The Strand Magazine, but as her
Campion saga went on, her following, and her sales, grew steadily. Campion
proved so successful that Allingham made him the centrepiece of another 17
novels and over 20 short stories, continuing into the 1960s.
Campion is a mysterious, upper-class
character (early novels hint that his family is in the line of succession to
the throne), working under an assumed name. He floats between the upper
echelons of the nobility and government on one hand and the shady world of the
criminal class in the United
Kingdom
Margery Allingham: the Dickens of detective writing
Margery
Allingham’s books show the evolution from well-plotted, bloodless stories to
psychologically acute crime novels
By Jake
Kerridge
6:30PM BST
12 Apr 2014 / http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/crimeandthrilerbookreviews/10761626/Margery-Allingham-the-Dickens-of-detective-writing.html
Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, James
Bond, Philip Marlowe, Lord Peter Wimsey… Hardly a week goes by without a
venerable fictional detective being de-mothballed so some new author can make a
bit of cash out of their old-fashioned charm. Enjoyable as some of these new
books are, I’m not sure we can say that all the original writers would have
approved. But somebody who was an early adopter of the idea of a crime series
being continued by other hands was Margery Allingham (1904-66), the creator of
the aristocratic sleuth, Albert Campion. Virtually on her deathbed she decreed
that her husband, Philip Youngman Carter, a former editor of Tatler, should
keep the Campion saga going.
With an uxoriousness that he had not been
notable for showing when his wife was alive, Carter carried out her wishes and
wrote a number of Campions before his own death three years later. A manuscript
he left unfinished has now been completed with a good deal of wit, style and
Allingham-esque lightness of touch by Mike Ripley, the former crime fiction
reviewer of this newspaper, under the title Mr Campion’s Farewell.
This seems like a good opportunity, then,
to reassess Allingham’s work. Literary historians usually lump her together
with Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and Ngaio Marsh as one of the “Queens of
Crime” from the so-called Golden Age of English detective fiction – roughly,
the period between the wars. The history of crime fiction in the 20th century
has often been presented as the evolution of the “detective story” – bloodless,
lightweight, prizing plot over characterisation – into the “crime novel”: grown-up,
disturbing, psychologically acute. Allingham’s Campion novels offer a rare
example of this evolution taking place within the work of one author.
She started off as perhaps the most
frivolous of the lot. Christie and Sayers, both older than Allingham, were more
deeply affected by the First World War (in their respective early books Poirot
is a refugee and Peter Wimsey is recovering from shell shock). Allingham, born
within a few months of Evelyn Waugh, was part of that post-war generation of
Bright Young Things who devoted themselves with the utmost seriousness to
levity, in reaction to the grim times just passed. Her early books are full of
genial young toffs, ever ready with quips as they casually outwit master
criminals and track down stolen treasures.
In The Crime at Black Dudley (1929), she
introduced the gangly, bespectacled Mr Campion, who masks his intelligence
behind a slightly irritating stream of sub-Bertie Wooster
Queen of crime
You might not read Margery Allingham's
detective novels for the plots, but her stories and insights are so
irresistible that guests keep stealing them, discovers Jane Stevenson
Jane
Stevenson
Saturday 19
August 2006 13.40 BST / http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/aug/19/fiction.shopping1
At least
twice in my life I have owned the complete works of Margery Allingham, but I
keep finding that some have gone astray. The detective-story collection is
stockpiled in the spare bedroom, and over the years I have found that the
Allinghams effortlessly top the list of Books Most Often Nicked (I stole half
of them from my mother in the first place; thin wartime Penguins with brittle,
browning paper and advertisements for Kolynos toothpaste or Craven
"A"s in the back). Quite a few people pass through this house, and I
can only think that guests pick up an Allingham to read in bed, get hooked and
take it away. I can't think of any other writer who has quite this effect,
certainly not among the interwar queens of crime.
Agatha
Christie and Ngaio Marsh are fundamentally focused on "how". Their
characterisation is crude, a bundle of quirks and characteristic utterances -
Poirot's "little grey cells" - while the actual writing is un-
demanding. Once the puzzle has been solved, there is no point in looking at the
book again: if you accidentally pick up a Christie you've read before, you put
it down again as soon as you realise it's the one where the murderer turns out
to be the butler's identical twin brother. Gladys Mitchell's books you are
sometimes, but not inevitably, pleased to revisit. She turned out more than 60
potboilers and an occasional perverse masterpiece (The Rising of the Moon is my
personal favourite).
By
contrast, all Allingham novels (except perhaps the first two) will, like those
of Dorothy Sayers, stand a good deal of rereading. But for all her considerable
intelligence and art, and her obvious feminism, Sayers's fiction is made hard
to read by her snobbery and racism. She quite patently saw working-class people
as lesser beings than the effortlessly superior Lord Peter, and she was
profoundly anti-semitic. This is not a problem with Allingham, who was a person
of genuinely wide human sympathy. For example, generally in interwar detective
stories, charwomen feature as imbecilic, drunken crones. But Miss Diane in The Beckoning
Lady is a precisely observed character with a history and something of an inner
life, presented without condescension.
Allingham
also has the enormous advantage over Sayers of being fond of her hero, but not
in love with him. Albert Campion starts his career as a silly-ass-about-town in
the Peter Wimsey mode, but he rapidly quietens down to a far more mature and
reflective personality who is palpably affected by the changing textures of
English life between the early 1930s and late 60s. Postwar, it is increasingly
clear that Campion's real business is with counter-intelligence (Allingham
hugely admired Le Carré), and the detective stories are merely interruptions to
a professional life lived not in the books, but between them.
She is the
least puzzle-minded of great detective-story writers. The question that always
interests her most is "why". Her plotting is a device to express
character: why specific people are led to do the things they do, a concern that
significantly advanced the genre. One aspect of the enduring appeal of her
books is that she was truly interested in how a life which seems monumentally
weird from outside can be one particular person's normality. What
"ordinary" means for a dodgy undertaker, perhaps, or a retired chorus
girl. It is this capacity for observation which has often made people think of
her as "Dickensian". Dickens invented surprisingly little, but walked
about London
Allingham,
as she moved about in shops, on trains or buses, in the street, did the same.
As her books demonstrate, she was a shameless eavesdropper. Fat and friendly,
she wandered through life looking innocuous and easy to talk to, and the
troubled, the boastful or the just plain weird gravitated towards her. There is
a certain advantage for a woman novelist in being middle-aged and overweight.
You acquire a curious social invisibility: strangers sometimes carry on in
front of you as if you weren't there; or if they chance to fall into
conversation, they talk, on occasion, with a surprising lack of inhibition.
Allingham's uncontrollable weight was a source of anxiety and distress in her
life (it arose from a thyroid problem), and she was often sad and anxious, but
she kept her griefs strictly to herself. The people she encountered found her
charming, sympathetic and jolly, and she made good use of this. She listened,
and she remembered - not merely to what people said, but to how they said it.
She has as good an ear for the quirks of individual speech as any English
novelist, and a great gift for seeing what was in front of her. As with
Dickens, the panorama of human oddities she presents reflects reality. I was
brought up in London London
Another
thing which makes her books worth revisiting is that she has such an acute
sense of place. Many of them are love-songs to London Mayfair when
she wanted to, yet she was sharply observant of run-down working-class areas,
which to her were not mean streets, but bursting with complex life. As she
became more prosperous, however, she moved out to an old house in a small Essex village, Tolleshunt d'Arcy, though she maintained a
pied-à-terre in Great Russell
Street London London London
She is
unusual among detective novelists in having a real understanding of the way the
country works. Country life and city life are intricately textured in
completely different ways; she understands a lot about both. I lived in the
English countryside for a long time, and when I had to deal with much the sort
of old fellows Allingham describes in books such as Mystery Mile, I often
recalled, during tortuous negotiations, Amanda's philosophical advice with
respect to questioning an old countryman - "not only will you not learn
anything at all, but all your rabbits will die". Allingham could see that
"coming the yokel" was often a deliberate strategy employed by tough
and shrewd people to force negotiations on to their own ground, and by no means
an indication of stupidity.
I doubt if
anybody reads a Margery Allingham for the detection, since the plots are mostly
fantastical to the point of campness. Her most interesting individual twist on
the genre was to abandon detection entirely and write what I think of as a
"convergence" story. That is, you, the reader, meet both the criminal
and the detective early on. Thus suspense related to discovery is set entirely
to one side, and the interest is transferred to questions of the villain's
psychology and how, or if, the detectives catch up with him (The Tiger in the
Smoke and Hide My Eyes are the classic instances). I imitated this structure in
London Bridges, a fond homage to Allingham's thrillers in which all the
"detection" that there is takes place on page 274 in the course of about
two minutes.
Each one of
her books has its own atmosphere. Not only is it distinctly located in a
particular place, or places, but each one is a very precise reflection of the
mood of the year in which it was written - which, again, is unusual in a crime
novelist of her vintage. Interwar detective stories tended towards nostalgia
and a certain fuzziness about dates which would make the books easier to
reissue. Allingham's earliest books are like that, but the war made a great
difference to her. She wrote a memoir of life in Tolleshunt in the first year
of the war (The Oaken Heart), and this seems to have drawn her attention to the
speed at which attitudes and mentalities were changing, a subject that came to
fascinate her.
Thus the
stories written during and after the war respond precisely to change. I am
writing a biography of a man of Allingham's generation, the painter Edward
Burra, and when I was reading up on social history, moving forward in time
through his life, it occurred to me that her crisply observant evocation of the
specific textures and concerns of the present moment would be very useful,
precisely because she wasn't intentionally writing a commentary on the times.
This turned out to be absolutely the case. Though her work is fantastical, it
is rooted in observation of the differences between the formative experiences
of one generation and the next.
She must
have been one of the first writers to observe the alienating potential of tower
blocks, even while the concrete was still setting in the first wave of postwar
town planning. "It's not quite like a street," says a policeman in
The China Governess, contemplating a tower-block corridor. "A lot can
happen without the neighbours knowing." Equally, she was the first
mass-market British writer to involve computers in a plot, as early as 1952 - a
Hollerith, in fact, the punch-card precursor to true computers - in The Tiger
in the Smoke
All the
books include a murder and its resolution, and most of them also have a love
story. The first is a genre requirement, the second an optional extra that
allows Allingham to maintain the light-hearted tone she generally prefers. But
if one looks at the deeper currents in her work, one theme that repeatedly
arises is how individuals adapt to the changing world and, above all, to their
own displacement by their natural successors. This is the central theme of More
Work for the Undertaker, for example. Much of her work protests the refusal of
one generation to recognise the legitimate needs of another; or looks at how
they can coexist with mutual respect. Heavy themes for light fiction; but
handled with such ease and grace that it is only in retrospect, if at all, that
one realises the book has engaged with some very serious ideas.
From
Coroner's Pidgin by Margery Allingham
"My
dear man," said Gee-gee pityingly. "We can't have a row. After all,
Johnny is who he is, isn't he? I know its fashionable to pretend to ignore
that, but one doesn't really, does one? No, we can't have Johnny involved in
anything definitely unpleasant. That's absurd, Johnny's sans reproche. I'll get
this chap to see reason, but it's not going to be a walkover. Doctors have got
completely out of hand, these days. I'll have to concentrate on him if you
don't mind. I'll see you downstairs, shall I?"
The last
remark was not a question and he opened the door again. He spoke once more
before he disappeared.
"Thanks
for the coffee. Awfully good of you. There's not a lot of help in the kitchen,
I'm afraid."
"You'd
be surprised," said Mr Campion briefly, and went downstairs.
He picked
up his hat on the way and walked quietly out of the house. He met no one, and
was thankful. The darkness swallowed him as he struck south-west purposefully.
Having reached a decision he felt relieved; this was the end of them all, as
far as he was concerned. There was just one more thing that must be done and
then he'd wash his hands of them.
As he
strode on through the misty darkness he tried to put the whole business out of
his mind, but it was not so easy. After long years of practice he had developed
a routine, and now, despite his inclinations, his brain persisted in carrying
on quietly with the investigation. Every scrap of information which he had
gathered in the twenty-four hours revolved before his inward eye, trying to
slip into the pattern which was already forming. The discovery that Gold
assumed automatically that Johnny was privileged beyond all the normal bounds
of civilized behaviour, was one of these. It had been odd coming from him and
had reminded Mr Campion of an incident of his own youth when the nurse of the
small friend who had just pushed him into the Round Pond, had turned to his own
avenging Nanna, and had said in exactly the same tone of startled protest:
"But
he's a Duke."
At the age
of four and a quarter, Mr Campion had taken a poor view of the excuse and did
so now, with the added advantage of knowing that ninety-nine percent of the
world agreed with him. All the same, he found it interesting to note that the
remaining one per cent still existed, and was at large. Another little piece of
the jigsaw slid into place.
Published May 2004
Lucas Books of Thorndon, Suffolk
Foreword:
Margery Allingham: an appreciation by Sara
Paretsky
Introduction:
'Children not Sausages' by Andrew Taylor
CHAPTER 1: GROWING UP 1904 - 1920
'The Education of a Writer: Margery
Allingham at Home and School' by Marianne van Hoeven
'The Rescue of the Rainclouds' by Margery
Allingham
CHAPTER 2: AT THE POLYTECHNIC 1920 - 1922
'The Apothecary': a dramatic monologue by
Margery Allingham
'"My Brain is Young; I still have
strength": Margery Allingham's Dido and Aeneas' by Tony Medawar
'A Medal' by Margery Allingham
CHAPTER 3: THE YOUNG PROFESSIONAL 1923 -
1927
'The Genesis of Blackkerchief Dick' by
B.A.Pike
'Green Corn' by Margery Allingham
CHAPTER 4: THE MYSTERY WRITER 1927 - 1933
'A Family Likeness: the place of Margery
Allingham in the pantheon of detective-story writers' by Catherine Aird
'Albert Campion – the Truth' by Roger
Johnson
'100 Lines for Albert Campion' by B.A.Pike
'The Inimitable Lugg' by Geraldine Perriam
'I Should Have Listened to Mother' by
Catherine Cooke
'Classifying Amanda: female and femininity
in the pre-war writing of Margery Allingham' by Marianne van Hoeven
'The Real Miss 1938' by Frank Swinnerton
'For Better or for Worse: a Sociologist and
Crime-writer's View of Sweet Danger' by Michelle Spring
CHAPTER 5: MAXWELL MARCH 1933 - 1936
'Maxwell March' by B.A.Pike
'Re X Deceased' by Margery Allingham
'The Man from the Shadows' or 'The Man Who
Died' by Margery Allingham
CHAPTER 6: 'FOR THE CONNOISSEUR' 1934 -1938
'Undertakers at the Funeral' by Nicholas
Fuller
'Lafcadio: the Painter and Posterity' by
John Sweetman
'Campion finds the Circus' by Shirley
Purves
'Dancers in Mourning: From Page to Screen'
by Susan Rowland
'Fashions in Shrouds: Fashions in Forensic
Pathology' by Stephen Leadbeatter
CHAPTER 7: THE SHORT STORY WRITER
'Short and Sweet' by Martin Edwards
'The Public Spirit of Francis Smith' by
Margery Allingham
'Six Against the Yard and 'It didn't work
out'' by B.A.Pike
'A Proper Mystery' by Margery Allingham
'A New Sort of Web' by Amanda Whytenor
CHAPTER 8: MARGERY'S WAR 1939 - 1945
'"A fine sturdy piece of work":
Margery Allingham reviewing for Time and Tide 1938-1944' by Julia Jones.
'Black Plumes: the 'forgotten' novel' by
Susan Peters
'A Corner in Crime' by Margery Allingham
'Remembering Marge' by Oriel Malet
'The Permutations of James: some notes on Margery's
Victorian ancestors' by Julia Jones
CHAPTER 9: THE POST-WAR YEARS 1946 - 1954
'Margery Allingham: an appreciation' by
H.R.F. Keating
'Memories of Auntie Margery and Uncle Pip'
by Guy M. Wilson
'Naming Names and Playing Games' by
Jennifer Schofield
Margery and Lavinia: a letter from Edward
Davis
'Margery Allingham's London
'From Albert to Albertine' by Jessica Mann
CHAPTER 10: 'THE JOLLY OLD FRUIT' 1955 -
1966
'Margery Allingham' by Natasha Cooper
'My Characters' by Margery Allingham
'Brief Encounter' by Margaret Yorke
'London
'In the Eye of the Beholder: Quirky Museums
of Margery Allingham' by B.J. Rahn
'Margery Allingham: a centennial
appreciation' by Robert Barnard
'The Relay (1964): Margery Allingham on
Ageing' by Margaret Kinsman
'Re-visiting Campion Country' by June
Thomson
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