Mr Campion's Visit

You might think writing light fiction is easy. Just try it. You might think writing whodunits is easy. Try that. You might think – no, you’re too sensible – that writing in the voice of a golden age master can’t be too difficult. Can it? Yes, it is. You need the rare talent of Mike Ripley to pull it off.

Here, in the sixth of his series, he has brought Marjorie Allingham’s Campion as up to date as seems feasible, the 1960s, in which the spry dilettante has become a “thin bespectacled white-haired gentleman”. Ripley has taken him back to where readers first made his acquaintance, Black Dudley, the scene of so much chaotic skulduggery in “The Crime At Black Dudley”. But time has moved on. Black Dudley, once “an isolated fortress guarding the rights and privacy of an elite few” has been transformed into an achingly new 1960s university (so what’s different?) with angular architecture, lecherous lecturers, stay-abed students, and a dead body beside the pool – a popular and priapic lecturer with a carving knife through his neck.

Enter the stolid and sullen police led by Inspector Appleyard to compete for clues with dapper Mr Campion, tripping over themselves on suspects (mainly lecturers) as they untangle a scrum of lovers, academic rivals and potential spies. Spies? Yes. Perhaps. The dead man, it transpires (and corpses do transpire, though that’s by the way) has used the university’s smart new computer to develop an algorithm that could bring untold wealth to any unscrupulous government or corporation that gets its hands on it. So whose hand was on the knife? You can trust Campion (along with his grizzly bear of an assistant, Magersfontein Lugg), just as you can trust the talented Mr Ripley, to reveal all. Once again, he joyfully revives the traditions and artful plotting of crime fiction’s Golden Age.