Review: Mystery Mile

Mystery Mile by Margery Allingham
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Margery Allingham knew how to write a gripping and complex mystery, and this is one.

An American judge whose career has been spent on a crusade against a specific criminal gang has had several narrow escapes from death in New York, and has now come to England with his son and daughter. They connect up with Albert Campion (not his real name, nor the only one he goes by), a disowned scion of the aristocracy who acts as something adjacent to a private detective or situation fixer, with some flexibility about his methods, and has a number of criminal contacts, some of whom he draws on in this book.

Campion brings the judge down to stay in the country with old friends, on a peninsula with only one entrance by land, surrounded by dangerous tidal mudflats. From this location, the judge disappears mysteriously and seemingly impossibly. The sister of the young squire is then kidnapped, and Campion, the girl's brother, the judge's son (who is in love with her, as Campion also is), Campion's ex-con manservant and the manservant's dodgy friend launch a thrilling rescue.

Meanwhile, they're trying to discover the identity of the gang leader, who has almost never been seen even by his subordinates. The judge had collected a clue in a children's book - which he doesn't know how to interpret.

Characters ranging from yokels to Cockney criminals to a remarkable Turkish art expert to a beloved old rector all come vividly to life, and in a couple of cases to death, in the course of the story, and our heroes get severely battered fighting for the right. It's gripping and thoroughly well executed, like Edgar Wallace if he had had a higher-class background and more education (which isn't a slight on Wallace; he did what he did extremely well).

I look forward to reading more in this happily long series.

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