I’m in a confusing place with Margery Allingham.  I definitely read three of her books when I started getting into Golden Age detective fiction, one of which, I’m almost certain, was The Beckoning Lady (1955) and very hard work indeed.  A few years passed, and I next thoroughly enjoyed the amoral ingenuity of Police at the Funeral (1931) before stumbling badly over Flowers for the Judge (1936) and sort of abandoning her, faintly dissatisfied. So when The Case of the Late Pig (1937) passed into my hands, the mere 132 pages of this Penguin edition commended themselves as an opportunity to reacquaint myself with the author and see how things go.

Learning of the death of his onetime school tormentor Rowland ‘Pig’ Peters at the moment that he happens to be reading an anonymous letter concerned with the same subject, gentleman sleuth Albert Campion attends the funeral and then forgets the matter, despite the odd people he encounters there. Five months later, following a suspicious death at refined country club Halt Knights, Campion is called in by the Chief Constable of the county and, upon viewing the body, sees that the victim is ‘Pig’ Peters, now late for a second time in one calendar year. So…what gives?

There is a liveliness to The Case of the Late Pig which I would struggle to associate with the previous Allingham’s I’ve read, and it hits you right from the off, not least in the relationship Campion has with his factotum, enabler, and all-round foil Magersfontein Lugg:

“While you remained strictly amateur you was fairly private, but now you keep runnin’ round with the busies, sticking your nose into every bit of blood there is about, and you’re gettin’ talked of. We’ll ’ave women sittin’ on the stairs waitin’ for you to sign their names on piller-cases so they can embroider it if you go on the way you are going. Why can’t you take a quiet couple o’ rooms in a good neighbour’ood and play poker while you wait for your titled relative to die? That’s what a gentleman would do.”

“If you were female and could cook I’d marry you,” I said vulgarly. ‘You nag like a stage wife.”

Reformed criminal Lugg is such a delightful creation, and so completely out of keeping with the demure, refined types like Peter Wimsey’s Bunter and Hercule Poirot’s Georges, that it’s difficult not to feel conventions being torn out by the roots during every magnificent line he’s on the page. Allingham, however, enables this realisation to seep in around Campion’s narrative, since to our central duo their mutual antagonism is part of the quotidian fabric of life.

“Extraordinary feller, your man,” said Leo as we drove off. “Keep an eye on him, my dear boy. Save your life in the war?”

“Dear me, no!” I said in some astonishment. “Why?”

He blew his nose. “I don’t know. Thought just crossed my mind.”

Indeed, amidst a plot which positively barrels forwards with almost no space to pause and breathe, Allingham does wonderful work with the flashes different characters get: Inspector Pussey looking “proudly puzzled…like a spaniel which has unexpectedly retrieved a dodo”, a landlady typified as “a poor old woman who had been too busy all her life to have had time to develop an intelligence”, Chief Constable Leo Pursuivant being scandalised at the prospect of playing bridge before lunchtime…as we rattle through the various disclosures on the way to our murderer, there’s plenty to enjoy. Even the architecture isn’t spared Campion’s pleasant disdain, with the main building of Halt Knights described as being “built by an architect who had seen the [British Museum] and never forgotten it”.

The murder — for murder it is, with Oswald Harris (as he is known at the club) was dozing in a deckchair when an ornamental flower urn dropped on his head from a height of two storeys — is pleasingly constructed within the genre’s more elaborate conventions, twisting in elements of the HIBK school (“How important that was I did not dream.”) as well as the old standfast of everyone being occupied at the time the murder occurred, meaning that no single person could have committed the act unless everybody is in on it. I suppose we veer into impossible crime territory here, but the opportunity for some Outsider to have crept in and murdered Harris for reasons of their own (everyone at the club had reason enough, believe me) is never quite disposed of.

A few typically unusual assertions must be borne — that someone coughs in the exact same way as their nephew is, apparently, a feature of genetics — but the speed at which this develops, and the energy put into those developments, is mostly very pleasing. It only really comes unstuck in the final stages, when the explanation for how the murder was achieved proves to be no real explanation at all and the various relationships that fall out fail to leave much of an impact because of how little we really know about the characters. I mean, Gilbert Whippet might be magnificently realised at first encounter…

It is about as easy to describe Whippet as it is to describe water or a sound in the night. Vagueness is not so much his characteristic as his entity. I don’t know what he looks like, except that presumably he has a face, since it would be an omission that I should have been certain to observe.

…but that sense of vagueness, while impressively maintained throughout, is unhelpful given the dual roles he comes to play. If Allingham slowed down on the corners, this would be less of a bracing wind-in-your-hair experience, but the endings would land more, there would be space and time to offer full explanations where they’re really required (rot13 for mild spoilers: V fgvyy qba’g shyyl haqrefgnaq jul gur obql jnf qhzcrq va gur evire…), and the one supposition of Campion’s which is held back almost to the point of unfairness would have a better chance of hitting the reader in a manner to better delight and intrigue. What it definitely doesn’t need, however, is more clarification around Campion, as the apprehension of the criminal contains a wonderfully brief moment that is all the more telling for how quickly Allingham skates over it; sometimes less is more, but not always.

My feelings toward this book can be best summed up, however, by saying that before I’d even reached the halfway point I had gone online to buy more Allingham — The Fashion in Shrouds (1938), since you asked — and heartily look forward to making the acquaintance of Campion and Lugg again. Perhaps I failed to spot the joie de vivre in her other books because of how comprehensively she seems to tailor her narrative tone to the style of story she’s telling, or maybe I was just a humorless ingrate when I read her before — either way, this was a wonderful reintroduction, and more Allingham will definitely follow.

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See also

Fiction Fan: I’m still not sure why Allingham gets ranked as one of the Queens of Crime – for my money she’s not a patch on ECR Lorac, for example, who is a “forgotten” author. But I suspect that’s more down to my subjective taste regarding style than an objective judgement about quality – I really don’t like the snobbery that comes with aristocratic detectives – and there’s no doubt Allingham has her fair share of dedicated fans. I don’t think I’ll ever class myself as one of them, but I find her quite entertaining for an occasional read. And, overall, for me this was one of the more enjoyable of the Campion novels.