I had forgotten just how much I liked Margery Allingham’s writing, though not how much I enjoyed her stories. As always, the class accents trouble me, but Campion is more a mockery of Sayers’ Lord Peter Whimsey (though I confess I enjoy those too) and these books are rather more self-aware of their station.
I am sad that Lugg has been reduced to nanny in this, but Allingham is such a marvelous observer of detail, look at these descriptions of London in a pea souper:
The fog was like a saffron blanket soaked in ice-water. It had hung over London all day and at last was beginning to descend. the sky was yellow as a duster and the rest was a granular black, overprinted in grey and lightened by occasional slivers of bright fish colour as a policeman turned in his wet cape.
Already the traffic was at an irritable crawl. By dusk it would be stationary. To the west the Park dripped wretchedly and to the north the great railway terminus slammed and banged and exploded hollowly about its affairs. Between lay winding miles of butter-coloured stucco in every conceivable state of repair. (9)
And this, a poem to Paddington Station, so different from the one I know:
The fog was thickening and the glass and iron roof was lost in its greasy drapery. The yellow lights achieved but a shabby brilliance and only the occasional plumes of steam from the locomotives were clean in the gloom. That tremendous air of suppressed excitement which is peculiar to all great railway stations was intensified by the mist, and all the noises were muffled by it and made more hollow-sounding even than usual. (19)
Both geography and a keen eye for the details of the post-war everyday
Meanwhile Crumb Street, never a place of beauty, that afternoon was at its worst. The fog slopped over its low houses like a bucketful of cold soup over a row of dirty stoves. The shops had been mean when they had been built and were designed for small and occasional trade, but since the days of victory, when a million demobilized men had passed through the terminus, each one armed with a parcel of Government-presented garments of varying usefulness, half the establishments had been taken over by opportunists specializing in the purchase and sale of secondhand clothes. Every other window was darkened with festoons of semi-respectable rags based by bundles of grey household linen, soiled suitcases, and an occasional collection of surplus war stores, green, khaki, and air-force blue…As they waited, Mr Campion reflected that the evil smell of fog is a smell of ashes grown cold under hoses, and he heard afresh the distinctive noise of the irritable, half-blinded city, the scream of brakes, the abuse of drivers, the fierce hiss of tyres on the wet road. (25)
This is reflected as well in the gang and their enormous cellar hideout — recalling old rubble films of a London where so much more is possible in the ruins. Not all of it good, as you see, but possible. It seems so distant from the sanitised and impossibly priced London of today.
I liked this too:
Mourning is not forgetting… It is an undoing. Every minute tie has to be untied and something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the knot. (33)
And this — as told by the inspector.
Remember V 2’s? The whole city waiting. Silent. People on edge. More waiting. Waiting for hours. Nothing. Nothing to show. Then, strike a light! Suddenly, no warning, no whistle, wallop! End of the ruddy world! Just a damned great hole and afterwards half the street coming down very slowly, like a woman fainting. (37)
The Tiger in the Smoke — most enjoyable.