Mr Campion' Farewell by Mike Ripley reviewed by Julia Jones

This would have been the third 'posthumous' Campion novel to have been written by Pip Youngman Carter, widower of the late, great, Margery Allingham. Allingham died in 1966 having completed eighteen varied mystery novels and a number of short stories which star the enigmatic detective Albert Campion. Campion had been created in the late 1920s by Allingham and Youngman Carter in the early days of their marriage. Allingham presented him as “the private joke-figure of we smarter youngsters” and gave her husband generous credit “for encouraging the humour which until then I had always tried to keep out of my work.”

Allingham dictated those early stories: Youngman Carter wrote them down. It was not long, however, before he found more amusing ways to spend his time while she became more serious and more personal in her approach to her novels and to her detective. “As the only life I had to give anyone was my own,” she wrote, “we became very close as time went by.” The character of Campion developed: the novels became less obviously funny, they became richer, darker, odder, more varied and more plangent.

Allingham continued to value her husband's opinion and liked to present the two of them publicly as partners in an “art-and fiction factory”. This was not often true. Nevertheless they were joint directors of a limited company and, when Allingham died, Youngman Carter's immediate task was to complete The Cargo of Eagles, her work in progress. He continued with his own two titles, Mr Campion's Farthing and Mr Campion's Falcon (both recently republished by Ostara) and, when he died in 1969, he left the beginnings of a third. Campion novel. It was no more than a fragment with no indication of character development or plot outline and it is this that Mike Ripley has taken up and completed – admirably.

There's something nasty brewing in the historic wool town of Lindsay Carfax and Superintendent Luke of the C I D persuades his old friend Campion to go down and take a look. Ripley identifies Lindsay Carfax with the Suffolk town of Lavenham and obviously relishes building up the subterranean geography of the place as well as a cast of variously unpleasant, untrustworthy and unstable characters. He claims, modestly, to be following Youngman Carter rather than Allingham herself but he's a more experienced and assured novelist than Youngman Carter ever was. He permits himself a wider range of characters, including (rather daringly) Campion's wife, the flame-haired Lady Amanda and their son, Rupert, with his young wife Perdita, one of Youngman Carter's own new characters. I have my doubts about the self-consciously thespian Rupert and Perdita but can't quibble at all with Ripley's decision to use them for the more physically adventurous chapters of the investigation.

Mr Campion is not longer young. In 1958 Allingham herself wrote a mock interview with Albert Campion in which she identified some of the problems facing an ageing series detective.

“My dear girl,” he said […] How can I?”

“Can you what?” […]

“Hop about. Pull guns and shoot lines […] I mean everyone knows how old I am. You saw to that, fixing it at the same age as the century so we shouldn't get muddled.”

Mr Campion's Farewell is set in the late 1960s / early 70s – the time that it would have been published had Youngman Carter lived to complete it. It has a consciously dated feel which Ripley manages well. Younger characters such Ripley's own Eliza Jane Fitton wear mini-skirts and have sex outside marriage but the seventy-year old Campion is always central to the action – much more so than he had been in most of the later Allinghams. There is no glossing over his infirmity. “He knew he was going to be too late. He was a man who could no longer keep up with his allies, let alone chase his enemies. He was too slow. He was too old.”

Unsurprisingly Ripley's publishers make the most of Allingham's name, announcing that “Margery Allingham's Albert Campion Returns”. It's a tribute to an author when their character becomes a brand. Allingham herself was a lifelong media professional. She knew about writing to an editor's or publisher's requirements to entertain readers and to make money. She called this “left-handed” writing and put her Campion short stories in this category. Her mature Campion novels were “right-handed” – motivated by a need to explore and express personal issues which went beyond the necessity to earn her living.

Youngman Carter's Albert Campion is clearly a “left-handed” creation but what about Mike Ripley's? He's a lifelong Allingham enthusiast and the process of writing a homage can be a very personal exercise in artistic exploration and self-expression. Ripley is not an admirer of the experimental Allingham (The Mind Readers for instance): he prefers the colour, the humour and the panache of early novels such as Look to the Lady and the extraordinary flair for period atmosphere which characterises The Tiger in the Smoke. These qualities are reflected in Mr Campion's Farewell and there's a depth of feeling to his portrayal of the ageing detective.

“'I came to Lindsay Carfax,” said Mr Campion, 'because I was intrigued by what sounded to be a really old-fashioned mystery, the sort of mystery that required an old fashioned adventurer.'

Mr Campion smiled his gentlest smile.

It was and I am. But both of us have had our day.”

Not a heartbeat passes before the publishers' eager announcement: Mr Campion will return in Mr Campion's Fox.

Mr Campion's Farewell was completed by Mike Ripley from an unfinished partial manuscript by Philip Youngman Carter.

Published by Severn House £19.99 1.4. 2014 Currently it's only in hardback. The paperback edition is due 28.8.2014. Currently I have no details about any Kindle edition or other eformat publication but will post information when available. (JJ)

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley reviewed by Julia Jones

MEET FLAVIA: MYSTERY SOLVER, MASTER POISONER, 11 YEARS OLD  I discovered this book in the old-fashioned way. It was recommended by an independent bookseller who survives, as I used to do, by a judicious mixture of knowing the tastes of her customers and persuading them to share her own enthusiasms. Catherine Hawley is primarily a second hand bookseller, based in Yorkshire, who runs an on-line list specializing in literary criticism, history, philosophy and always has a good selection of titles costing less than £1. You can take a look at C.L.Hawley books or sign up for her newsletter as I do. She also runs a reading group for 9-11 year olds and writes about some of her selections in a separate blog Gifted. It's intended for teachers and librarians and tries to help them avoid the wrath of protective parents by assessing titles in terms of their 'peril' factors, their handling of relationships, death, racism, Anything Else. It's actually not proscriptive but helpful and rather interesting. (I must declare an interest as my Ravelled Flag has recently been included.) 

The Flavia de Luce series has not, as yet been reviewed on Gifted but on the evidence of this first volume, there's no reason why the stories should not appeal to talented child readers as well as to adults. The heroine is an opinionated 11 year old with a passion for chemistry. She lives in a gorgeously un-realistic English country house, apparently in the 1950s, with her widowed father, two older sisters Ophelia and Daphne (Feely and Daffy), a cook who makes custard pie in the full knowledge that all of them dislike it and a devoted, possibly murderous, shell-shocked, gardener. All are mad in their separate ways and the hapless Amazon reviewers who complain that the series is "not realistic" have spectacularly missed the point.

Flavia is precocious, pretentious and insatiably curious -- her "particular passion is poison". At the beginning of the book her main outlet for her talent is defending herself in her war against her older sisters but the delivery of a jack snipe with a rare stamp impaled on its beak plus the discovery of a body in the rose bed sends her hurtling round the countryside on her trusty bicycle, Gladys. The plot is sufficient and the cast of characters "cosy" in a detective novel "Golden Age sense. There's the friendly, slightly deferential policeman, the spinster librarian, the obsessive prep school headmaster, the barmaid but the reason to read (and I suspect to cherish) Flavia de Luce is for the narrative style.

Whenever I'm out of doors and find myself wanting to have a first rate think, I fling myself down on my back, throw my arms and legs out so that I look like an asterisk and gaze at the sky. For the first little while I'm usually entertained by my 'floaters', those wormy little strings of protein that swim to and fro across one's field of vision like small dark galaxies. When I'm not in a hurry I stand on my head to stir them up, then lie back to watch the show as if it were an animated cinema film.

There are six titles in the series, so far, and this first volume is full of hints that there may be a complex over-arching plot connected with the death of Flavia's aviatrix mother. The titles are idiosyncratic and I'm currently awaiting the arrival of vols 2 & 3 The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Noose and A Red Herring Without Mustard. They will come with the stateliness of paper and snail mail. All are also available on Kindle at the click of a mouse. Independent writer-publishers and independent readers must not, however, completely forget the contribution of independent booksellers.  

The Adventures of Margery Allingham by Julia Jones reviewed by Valerie Laws

This is an incredibly detailed and thorough biography - one feels its subject would have approved of the amount of hard work and painstaking research that has clearly gone into it, workaholic as Allingham was. Jones has told the whole story of the writer's life with warmth and yet with detachment, her enthusiasm for Allingham's idiosyncratic, literate 'Golden Age' crime novels balanced by her hard look at the contradictions in this woman's life and the lives of those around her.

Poor 'Marge' was indoctrinated with the work ethic as a writer, by a family of writers, her father in particular producing incredible amounts of wordage to earn his family a crust, and she kept the workaholic ethic going throughout her life, though plagued by ill health and a dead weight of hangers-on. Julia Jones is much fairer to Marge's husband Pip than I would be - I'd like to kick him in the nuts quite frankly. Allingham was trapped at a time when women were beginning to have financial success as genre authors, and she always felt obliged to work and support her family, yet she exhausted herself further trying to be the 'woman' to her oxygen thief of a husband who did nothing but live on her earnings, shag around, and ignore her sufferings.  

This was a significant time for women, after WW1 and then through WW2, and it's also fascinating from a class point of view, as the upper/upper middle classes had to learn to make do with fewer or even no servants and actually make the odd cup of tea for themselves or even meet people from other class backgrounds who weren't waiting on them. Her massive sense of responsibility was as heavy as the extra weight she carried, something she struggled to manage - let down by typical male doctors of the time, who gave her ECT (what hideous cruelty) when she clearly had thyroid problems. Oddly even after this had been diagnosed and treated it was sort of forgotten again so her suffering went on. Interestingly, Dorothy L Sayers used hypothyroidism as the subject for a Lord Peter Wimsey short story, so the symptoms were known about at that time and there's no excuse for her medical men.  

I have to admit here I've never really taken to Allingham's books before, though have resolved to have another go - I find it hard to warm to Campion, her sleuth - and of the 'Golden Age' queens of crime, I love Sayers and Ngaio Marsh, and at one time Christie, much much more. Fans of Allingham's fiction will find this book even more enthralling than I did, but anyone with an interest in women's lives at that time of major change, and that period generally, will find much to interest them. I was fascinated by all the historical detail, the attitudes, and the actually quite tragic yet triumphant life of Allingham herself and the formidable output of work she produced. Julia Jones clearly had much primary material and the trust of the family and has been true to her subject and those around her.

There is some material added on since first publication, including a sex scandal - apparently Pip found time between lazing about and sulking to have a secret love child with dashing lesbian journalist Nancy Spain - something tells me he'd never have changed any nappies. In the meantime, Margery had no children of her own, her time filled with frantic writing to support Pip, her household, and the Inland Revenue. Successful writers then could become trapped in a ludicrous and surreal Kafkaesque situation where they were basically being taxed faster than they could write, living under house arrest madly scribbling and dreading letters and visits from the tax man, while their books sold in huge numbers to loyal fans who probably imagined them living like film stars. I seem to recall the same thing happened to Georgette Heyer. Poor Margery, she deserves this biography, and Julia Jones has done her subject proud.

The Adventures of Margery Allingham is on Kindle

Manhattan '62 by Reggie Nadelson reviewed by Julia Jones

Reggie Nadelson is a woman of many talents. She's a travel writer,  a documentary film-maker, a journalist, a foodie and is impressively knowledgeable about the cultural politics of jazz and early rock music. She is also the author of the Artie Cohen series of crime novels. There have been nine titles to date, each book evoking the ethnographies, the atmospheres, the mores of specific areas of New York city -- small unique enclaves within Brooklyn, Harlem, Manhattan, each of them as distinctive and individual as villages. Her 2011 Artie Cohen novel, Bloodcount, centred on a single building, the Louis Armstrong Apartments in Harlem during the emotional aftermath of Barack Obama's December 2008 election. It was memorable for its sense of place, of personal histories and its evocation of an unrepeatable moment in time.

Nadelson's new novel, Manhattan '62, takes the action back to the thirteen days of the Cuban Missile Crisis. On October 16th 1962, when President Kennedy was first shown the evidence of Russian missile sites, New York detective Pat Wynne is taken to view a body on one of the piers by the Hudson River. Wynne knows that this is an area that the Mafia use for executions. A Mob killing, maybe that's all it is -- or perhaps the victim was one of those 'homos' that the Mayor of New York is trying to eradicate before the World Trade Fair comes to the city. This is 1962 when gay sex was illegal in both the UK and USA. Senator McCarthy was dead by 1962 but his legacy of smear and suspicion lived on, poisoning both private and public lives. To be suspected of homosexuality was at least as damaging as to be accused of communist sympathies
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There's paranoia in the city. Tommy, the twelve-year-old who has found the body, is convinced that there are spies coming in via the Hudson River: "Reds. Fucking Commies. Russkis. Cubans. Gonna kill us all." Detective Wynne would be glad to believe that the body on the pier was a 'normal' Mafia payback but he can't. The dead man has a tattoo that Wynne has seen before -- a worm entwined around the slogan 'Cuba Libre'.   He's seen it on another mutilated corpse, a young girl found hanging from the High Line. Wynne was investigating her case but got little support from his fellow-officers and has made no progress in discovering either the victim's identity or her killer.

This time it's worse as he's convinced that he knows the most likely suspect for the murder -- his new Russian friend, Maxim Ostalsky. Wynne first met Ostalsky in Greenwich Village, just a few months earlier when he watched the Russian trying, ineptly, to buy a hot dog. The American is a veteran of the Korean War, he's damaged and suspicious yet, from that moment, Ostalsky has him charmed. They have become friends -- drunk together, smoked and talked and loved the same woman. It is this portrayal of an unlikely friendship that raises Manhattan '62 above the level of a normally good historical detective story. The bewildering political complexity of the thirteen days of the Cuban Missile Crisis is mediated through Wynne's confusion as he is warned off the murder case and finds his closest colleagues and even his family unwilling to take his calls. He becomes a pariah, struggling with his suspicions of Ostalsky, with his sexual jealousy but still vulnerable to the Russian's apparent openness and charm. Inevitably there is betrayal on both sides -- and all this in a city on the verge of nuclear holocaust.

Nadelson's writing is a delight - tangy, idiomatic, instantly involving - and for readers of her excellent 2009 Artie Cohen novel Londongrad there is a final, satisfying connection, which I should have guessed but didn't.

The Operator by Valerie Laws reviewed by Julia Jones

The opening scene of Valerie Laws's crime novel The Operator is one of the most unpleasant I have ever read. A boy lies on the examination table with a badly broken leg: the surgeon is examining him. The surgeon's expert fingers know exactly where to probe – but their aim is to hurt and not to heal. The boy is greeny-white with agony: his mother, watching helplessly, suffers almost as much as he does. The surgeon relishes every moment, a squeeze here, a small twist there – every additional wave of inflicted agony feeds his sense of power. And when the session is at an end, the mother reminds her son to “Thank the doctor, dear” – and the boy does. If ever there was a character I wanted DEAD it was that surgeon.

But he is not the Operator of the story's title and I have to say I was glad of that. As a reader I couldn't have stood too much more of such subtle, brilliantly conveyed sadism. Valerie Laws is a powerful writer with a high level of anatomical knowledge – I would recommend her poems about dissection, medical specimens and the brain in the collection All That Lives – but she also has a quickness and a sense of humour that prevents her from serving up an undiluted horror novel. The Operator is the second in her series of Bruce and Bennett investigations featuring the antagonistic, sexually attracted Erica Bruce (homeopath, journalist, fitness freak, recovered anorexic) and the harrassed, competent, good-looking police officer, Will Bennett. They met in The Rotting Spot, a murder mystery set on the coast in the North East of England, an area Laws knows well and evidently loves. It's bleak, it's beautiful, it's also tawdry and suburban. One of the most memorable scenes in The Operator involves a near-drowning in the wild waters off the town pier but the intense jealousies around membership of the exclusive local golf club are equally important in providing possible motives for the series of crimes committed.

Bruce and Bennett have had an affair but (currently) it is over. Their complicated feelings for one another do little to promote clear thinking but in The Operator the reader is with Erica. She is involved with crimes by accident, initially but being an awkward, passionate, stubborn character, the more she is advised to leave detection to the professionals, the less inclined she is to do so. Erica's mix of obsessive self-searching, impetuosity, obstinacy and prickly defensiveness provides the special pleasure of The Operator. The idea of the novel is excellent as is the evocation of place, the twists of the plot and the depiction of minor characters, especially Stacey, Erica's self-appointed 'intern'. Erica, however, is unique. She hovers on the brink of being the most irritating character ever to make the life of a young policeman difficult but she is quick, funny and intensely human. I was uncertain about her in The Rotting Spot, in The Operator I have succumbed. I think she'll continue to grow so, much as I like her current squeeze, I hope there's a third novel on the way and that detective Bennett might be given another chance.

Where to begin reading Margery Allingham by Julia Jones

The new CWA Margery Allingham short story competition received its first entries within a few weeks of being announced. People also began to ask about Margery Allingham's novels. This article is reblogged from the Crime Readers Association website.

Where to begin reading Margery Allingham?

What an alluring question. How I envy readers this treat in store ...

To begin at the beginning is usually sound advice and, with Margery Allingham’s ‘Campion’ novels, beginning at the beginning offers the additional interest of seeing how experimental and adventurous she was as a writer. All her Campion novels are composed within the detective ‘box’ (as she called it) but there’s a world of difference between the goofy Wodehousian spree in Mystery Mile (1930) and the intellectual questioning of new communication methods in The Mind Readers (1965). Both books are set in deserted stretches of the East Anglian coast line but there’s more than half a lifetime of imaginative experience and writerly development in between. 

If a chronological approach doesn’t appeal, then readers can select according to taste. For bright foolery in rural settings pick Mystery Mile or Sweet Danger (1934); for greater depth of characterisation and the flavour of a mid-nineteen-thirties artistic household as well as a plot where relationships really matter, try Dancers in Mourning (1937). The novelist A.S. Byatt identified the wartime thriller Traitor’s Purse (1941) as her personal favourite whereas I hesitate between the rich eccentricity of More Work for the Undertaker (1948) and the bleak psychological tension of Hide My Eyes (1958).

Tiger in the Smoke (1952) is Margery Allingham’s most famous novel. It’s a bold, almost epic confrontation of good and evil in the choking fog of a post-war, post-Dickensian London. Tiger in the Smoke removes the central element of puzzle from the plot – the reader is never in any doubt whose hand is wielding the knife – but Allingham intensifies the suspense in a way that anticipates some of the best crime-writing of today.

Allingham is a detective novelists’ detective novelist. From Agatha Christie to P.D. James and Sara Paretsky her fellow-writers have praised her style and technique. But she was also a big personality; warm and witty, intellectually acute and imaginatively generous. These qualities permeate her fiction and keep her readers loyal. On reflection I don’t really envy the readers who are currently poised to discover Allingham. I began reading the Campions when I was an undergraduate and now, more then thirty years on, I’m a grandparent and the books have stuck by me throughout. When I re-visited them recently I discovered two of my least favourite volumes (naming no names) were far better than I’d remembered. I think it’s because this series of novels is also the record of a life. I’ve changed over the years – as we do – so it’s unsurprising that there are aspects of the mature Allingham that I read differently as I catch her up in age.

The only advice I can sincerely offer to new readers is don’t dither for too long. The novelist Jane Stevenson says that the Margery Allinghams on her bookshelf are the novels most likely to be filched when weekend guests return home. To avoid being tempted into such criminous acts hasten to your nearest bookseller or local library -- or press that electronic button.

The Darkness by Bill Kirton

The Darkness is the pivotal, thrid episode in Bill Kirton's Cairnburgh series. I read and admired Material Evidence some time ago and felt confident that there would be more treats in store when I had time to explore the series further. DCI Jack Carston however has not been having such a happy time. The cases he encounters on a day-to-day basis are beginning to drag him down. He understands only too well the darkness that can blight a life from the inside. He has seen too much brutality, sorrow, injustice and wrecked lives.

Carston is a reflective policeman who relies on his intuition as well as the meticulous sifting of evidence. It's his own self-awareness that helps him to move into the minds of others and which also makes him ready to plead privately guilty to some of the casual sexism that pervades the police station as well as so many other households in the town. Crucially, in this case, it helps him to understand and even empathise with vigilantism. Understand – but not, finally, to condone. One of the best scenes in the novel is Carston's encounter with the lawyer who has so often assisted the guilty to walk free on technicalities. Not only has he grown rich: he knows what he is doing – and why.

Carston's sense of internal darkness is shared more intensely and dangerously by the bereaved brother of a suicide victim who takes justice into his own, increasingly unstable hands. This character, a good, compassionate and even humourous doctor, is the book's most compelling voice as he descends further and further in to the evil which he knows and loathes. There are others – Rhona, the working girl who thinks she has found a way to control her life and Jessie the alcoholic abuse victim. There is a moment of imaginative beauty when Jessie performs her own unsteady, sherry-fuelled dance in the twilight area of the homeless.

Violence by men against women permeates this book as a darkness of its own. I'm not sure whether Kirton is presenting this as endemic in urban Scotland or whether this is the specific darkness of this book. I'll need to read more in the series to find out. Meanwhile I am left distressed by my final glimpse of Rhona and sickened by Jessie's fate. This is a disturbing book – it's also a very good one.

Others in the series are: Material Evidence (1) Rough Justice (2) , Shadow Selves (4) .Unsafe Acts (5) 

Reviewed by Julia Jones

Missing Believed Dead by Chris Longmuir

This is the third book in Chris Longmuir's Dundee Crime series but it's the first that I've read. I didn't feel excluded by this however - merely intrigued. 

Detective Sergeant Bill Murphy appears to be shattered by previous experiences and his friend and former partner Detective Inspector Michaels is still in hospital. This means a new DI arriving in the Dundee office – a woman this time. Tough on the Dundee team and tough on DI Kate Rawlings as well. She's been happy in Forfar: Dundee presents a new and daunting challenge. 

Fortunately for working relationships DI Rawlings isn't given much time to antagonise her new colleagues or be antagonised by them. She and her team are swiftly involved in an ongoing investigation which is threatening to spiral out of control. Everyone's skills are needed if a final tragedy is to be averted.

This is competent, confident crime-writing: the sort that keeps the reader wanting just one more chapter ... and another and another. I read with pleasure and almost without pause and I now look forward to catching up on Longmuir's earlier series titles, Night Watcher and Dead Wood.

It's realistic writing too  – though I hope that there are some days in Dundee when it's not either raining, freezing or blowing a gale. Longmuir's tartan is distinctly noir. There's no glamour in this world – typical scenes take place in a sink estate where it's too risky to run your hand up the stair rail because of what might be smeared on it. But at least there's life in the estate, unlike the expensive mansion of a be-wigged and botoxed former actress or the shoddiness of the the pole-dancing club on the morning after when the cleaners come to work. No wonder Diane, the mentally fragile mother whose daughter has gone missing spends every day scrubbing until her hands are raw.

The plot twist is a good one and, although Longmuir doesn't offer a happily-ever-after ending, there is sufficient resolution of the drama and alleviation of the central characters' misery to leave the reader satisfied that ordinary life will go on. 

Until the next time Chris Longmuir picks up her pen, that is.

reviewed by Julia Jones