Catherine Aird is the pseudonym of English novelist Kinn Hamilton McIntosh MBE. She is the author of more than twenty crime fiction novels and several collections of short stories.
This, the author’s latest work is the seventh book in a series that has already given much enjoyment to his readers and to the many aficionados of the works of Margery Allingham herself as well. Those admirers of Evadne Childe, a famous detective novelist round whom the plot revolves, must control their impatience until the book is read. It will not disappoint.
It is always a pleasure to read about Albert Campion in either of his manifestations (quite the best word in the circumstances) but it is a particular pleasure to read about him in Mike Ripley’s latest book about one of crime-writing’s favourite characters. The plot is a somewhat unusual one: a mixture of true crimes, remembered well by the older ones amongst us, intertwined with a rare fictional approach to them by crime-writer Evadne Childe, Albert Campion playing his customary mysterious role. Needless to say the affairs of the Campion family also figure prominently, while all that needs to be said about Magersfontein Lugg is that he is his usual self.
I personally could not have asked for more in that I was wafted painlessly back to the time when I grew up. I remember it all so well that the remembrance itself almost got in the way of the reading. The tale covers a number of locations - the seedier side of London in the Nineteen Fifties, grubby SOHO pubs and even grubbier Clubs, an elegant London Town house borrowed from a famous mountaineer whom I suspect we are meant to identify, and naturally a rural village in the East Anglian hinterland. Although, when in that literary compass comprising the East, South and West points of Allingham, Campion and Ripley, the needle oscillates between them when it settles it always swings to the true north of the county of Essex.
Time, too, comes into the narrative and does not stay still. Instead we are treated to a series of vignettes as time passes and the years of the story move on – and history with it. The role of the crime writer as social historian is one waiting to be written up but just as Margery Allingham proved herself to be one so Albert Campion quae Mike Ripley makes the observations that matter, the London smog being as important in this book as in THE TIGER IN THE SMOKE.
The whole is enlivened by an author’s eye view of the ways of the publishing world, then and now, which your reviewer found entertaining but is prudently refraining from endorsing. (Never quarrel with your bread and butter was a maxim I was taught very early on).
