Margery Allingham: Traitor's Purse (1941)

Edition: Penguin, 1993
Review number: 559

Traitor's Purse is one of my favourite Campion novels, notwithstanding the absurdities of the plot. Campion struggling with amnesia while trying to save the country from a sinister plot of some kind - though he can't remember what - is one of Allingham's most human creations, transcending the cold caricature of her early novels. (It is not that I don't enjoy the earlier novels, it's just that it's here that Campion becomes real.)

The novel's big problem is connected with the amnesia. It is hardly believable that Campion should refrain from telling the woman who appears to be his fiancée - whom he actually recognises as someone he knows well - that he cannot remember a thing from before he woke up in hospital. It adds to the poignancy of his situation, as he cannot remember the in jokes and shared experiences that are so important in a close relationship, yet it is an extremely unlikely situation.

There are other unlikely aspects to the novel, including the scheme that Campion is meant to be investigating. It is more a thriller than a detective story, because of the character of the investigation, yet it has a special place in the sequence of crime novels in which it falls.

Margery Allingham: The Case of the Late Pig (1937)

Edition: Penguin
Review number: 17


This is an unusual member of Allingham's Campion series, as it is told in the first person from Campion's point of view. This, to me, makes it immediately more successful than some others in the series, by avoiding what I consider to be Campion's most annoying fault. In many of the books, I find there is too great a credibility gap between Campion's silly-ass public persona and the true, intelligent crime fighter underneath. ("Mild mannered janitor by day, Hong Kong Fuey...")

Campion receives a cryptic anonymous note which invites him to the funeral of a man he knew from school (and disliked), R.I. Peters, known as "Pig". (Few other writers would name the corpse in a detective novel with the initials RIP - this is before the days of Reginald Iolanthe Perrin.) He attends the funeral, intrigued by the note.

A few months later, Campion receives another note, and then is asked by a friend to go to the village of Kepesake where a man has been murdered. The corpse turns out to be Pig, who is already dead. So Campion has to work out how he was buried the first time round, how he came back to life, and why he died again. And then the corpse goes missing...