Review: Mr Campion & Others

Mr Campion & Others by Margery Allingham
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've so far only read the first Campion novel, but plan to read the series, so I picked up this collection of short stories to check what it was like. They're mostly light, fairly amusing pieces. Most of them are not murder mysteries (though there are one or two) but kidnappings, blackmail, con jobs, jewel thefts and the like.

In all of them, Campion works with his Scotland Yard contact and friend, Stanislaus Oates, who holds several different ranks in the different stories. The stories are not arranged in order of internal chronology, so Oates can be a superintendent in one story and then a chief inspector in the next. Because they appeared in several different magazines, and the readers might not have read other stories or indeed any Campion at all, they are all standalones, and apart from Oates being promoted there's no development or change in the characters, including Campion.

Where his age is mentioned, Campion is generally around late thirties to early forties, unmarried and apparently unattached, and conscious of the age gap between him and the naive young women who sometimes seek his help as if he was an honorary uncle. They're all of his own class; he's upper class, which is a big part of his expertise and his usefulness to the middle-class Oates, though of course Campion is also a skilled amateur detective. He has casual entree to circles that would be closed to the official police, at least without some concrete evidence of a crime, and even then, they would stand out as he does not.

The crimes and their unwinding are clever ones, though the short format limits how complicated they can be, and overall it's a solid collection of enjoyable mysteries. I look forward to reading more of the novels so that I can see how Allingham takes advantage of the longer format to develop more depth and complexity.

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