Review: Dancers In Mourning

Dancers In Mourning by Margery Allingham
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Unusually, this book includes a callback to earlier in the series: a character from Police at the Funeral reappears, and is the means of introducing Campion into the investigation into what is, at first, just a series of nasty pranks played on a prominent theatrical producer/dancer with the apparent goal of disrupting his show and/or emotional stability (inasmuch as theatre people can be said to have emotional stability).

It omits a callback to Sweet Danger, in which Campion more-or-less promised a very young woman that when she was old enough, they would try a relationship. (It's less creepy than it sounds, in context.) I would have expected some such callback, because in this book he inadvertently and rather to his dismay falls in love with his client's wife.

Campion's love interests always seem to be unavailable. A good half of them end up with (or, in this case, start out with) someone else, for a start. Having played out a similar pattern - excluding the someone-else's-wife part - in my own young adult life, I sympathise, though I got past it at a younger age than Campion; it's a form of self-sabotage, probably, or self-protection against actually having to deal with a relationship.

As always, all the characters are vivid, individual and mostly eccentric, or at least distinctive in some way. Not the least vivid of them is Lugg, Campion's ex-con manservant. Sent to fill in as butler at the country house that's the centre of the events when the existing butler resigns, Lugg declares, "I'll do anything, as long as it's not common." Which is amusing, because Lugg is always common, as his habit of addressing his employer as "cock" attests. He ends up teaching the theatrical manager's six-year-old daughter to pick locks with a hairpin and run the three-card-monte scam, much to her delight, and probably nobody else's.

To my surprise, I figured out the murderer some time before Campion did, though I didn't have his personal stake in the answer. It's not the best of the series, but mainly because of the character work I still feel it deserves five stars.

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