For reasons well beyond my comprehension, Felony & Mayhem sent us the 14th installment in this classic mystery series to review. Over the last few years, I have read and reviewed more fiction series than I can easily remember. Sometimes, I am lucky enough to start the series at the time the first installment is published and then just read the subsequent installments as they are released. Sometimes, I hear about an interesting series that’s been around for a while and we are able to convince a publisher to send us the first installment and a couple of books later in the series so I can get a better sense of the overall story line and style. I think this may be the first time I’ve tried to write a review of a series based on a single installment—and this far along in the overall story. Bear with me!
First, a little background, with acknowledgements to Wikipedia—the Felony & Mayhem website is under reconstruction and not much information is available there right now. This British mystery series, featuring a character named Albert Campion, was originally written during the 1930s-1950s, which is exactly the same time period in which the action of the novels takes place. Born in 1904, Margery Allingham was still a young woman in her 20s when she introduced Campion as a minor character in The Crime at Black Dudley.
Campion is a somewhat unlikely lead character for a mystery series. He’s not an officer of the law, nor (as far as I can tell) is he a working private detective. I would hazard a guess that he’s from a relatively well-off family and so for him this business of solving crimes is a diversion, a serious hobby, if you will. At the time of The Tiger in the Smoke (originally published in 1952), Campion is middle-aged and married to a woman named Amanda. They have one child, a young son named Rupert. Both of these characters appear in this novel.
Most of the action in The Tiger in the Smoke takes place in London during a rather chilly late fall when the city is blanketed in smoky fog. Allingham does a splendid job of using narrative to portray this aspect of the city. Here’s a sample from the very first page: “The fog had crept into the taxi where it crouched panting in a traffic jam. It oozed in ungenially, to smear sooty fingers over the two elegant young people who sat inside.” Overall, her description of the city is spot on, although I looked in vain for any references to some of the war damage I would have still expected to be a significant feature of London in the early 1950s.
The aforementioned young people drive the whole plot of this novel. Geoffrey Levett and Meg Elginbrodde have recently announced their engagement. Since that announcement was made, Meg has been receiving photographs that lead her to wonder if her husband Martin was really killed during the war. Naturally the suspicion that she may not be a widow after all puts a pall over their joy. Meg works for Campion’s sister Val and is friends with his wife Amanda, so naturally she calls upon him to help her figure out what’s going on. He brings in his colleague Charles Luke, a Divisional Detective Chief Inspector with Scotland Yard. At least in this novel, Allingham puts considerably more attention into fleshing out the character of Luke than she does Campion. Maybe her intent is to keep Campion as something of a cipher—since it turns out Albert Campion isn’t even his real name.
Coincidentally (well, not at all), a hardened criminal who calls himself Jack Havoc escapes from prison and embarks upon a killing spree—first doing in the psychiatrist who was examining him, then knocking off three people who happened to be in the vicinity of the office of Martin Elginbrodde’s solicitor. Havoc is indeed the “tiger” for whom the novel is named–and quite a formidable adversary he is. He is intelligent, savage, and elusive. And it appears that he has help from several other people, at least one of whom has close access to Meg Elginbrodde.
The person who really solves this mystery isn’t Campion or DDCI Luke, although they both have a hand in it—as does Levett. It’s rather Meg’s father, a wise and eccentric Church of England cleric known as Canon Avril. The chapters toward the end of the novel that portray the process by which Avril figures out who Jack Havoc really is, where he has been hiding and what he wants are truly masterful. They more than make up for any disorientation I experienced diving into this series so late in the game.
When all was said and done, there were a total of twenty-two novels in the Albert Campion series, including one completed by Allingham’s husband after her death and another two he wrote himself—not to mention several novellas and short stories. As far as I can tell, Felony & Mayhem has re-released fourteen of these titles, of which The Tiger in the Smoke is the most recent. BBC has twice developed film adaptations of stories in the series, first in the late 1950s and again in the late 1980s. I am going to check out the latter. It could be quite interesting!
(Felony & Mayhem, 2010)
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