Published in 1931, this is another by Margery Allingham (1904-66). It's the fourth (and actually the second that same year) to feature upper-class but incognito sleuth Albert Campion (the series started in 1929).

I've been reading Allingham all out of order, starting with More Work for the Undertaker (published in 1948, and No. 13 in the series) and going on to Coroner's Pidgin (published in 1945, and No. 12).

So it has been interesting to meet a much younger Campion. "Lank and immaculate", he's much more the ass-about-town at this stage, cultivating an "amiable idiocy" in the interests of getting results. (He matures, though, over the course of the book -- despite the hints dropped by one of the high-born characters that he might be of royal blood.)

And yes, this is another of Allingham's bizarre book titles (there's plenty of death but no actual funeral...).


Margery Allingham

Campion (spoilers ahead) is called to Cambridge by Marcus Featherstone, a friend from university days, to investigate the disappearance of Andrew Seeley, a relative of Featherstone's fiancee (Joyce). It soon transpires that the missing man is dead. Next, hot on the heels of what the police are treating as murder, comes the death of another family member, and an unsettling attack on a third.


"Famous scholar's nephew found shot dead in river"

It's a very peculiar family, this one. We have the widowed matriarch, Great-aunt Caroline, who presides, with iron authority, over a dysfunctional set of aging, squabbling relatives. With the exception of poor Joyce, everyone hates everyone else, so motives abound for doing away with each other. (The family felt, to me, like a darker prototype for the weird Palinode tribe that appears in More Work.)

It's a closed-circle mystery -- circumstances are such that the murderer must have come from within the family -- so the atmosphere becomes highly claustrophobic and oppressive, as you wonder whose turn it is next.

The house -- gabled, and featuring small windows, and gloomy, creeper-covered walls -- also develops a kind of evil personality of its own, in a way that's almost reminiscent of Shirley Jackson: "There was nothing definitely unpleasant about the house," Allingham tells us, "but it had some of the grim dignity and aloofness of an institution and the sightless expression of a house in which all the blinds have been drawn... Campion, who was by no means a nervous man, was seized by a sudden revulsion of feeling which he could not explain. It was not so much a terror of the unknown as a sense of oppression brooding over the house, a suffocated feeling as if he were set down inside a huge tea-cosy with something unclean."

But sometimes the building inspires our pity -- "[Campion woke in the night and] caught a fleeting impression of the house as some sick, many-petticoated creature crouching frightened in the unrelenting darkness" -- because it has been somehow tainted by its occupants.


"Uncle Andrew had insisted on walking home from church"

These factors all made for a good and gripping read. But there were a few negatives.

For this blogger, the novel concludes "with an out-of-left-field solution that is both utterly surprising and utterly satisfying". I'm not totally certain I'd agree with that... The solution turns out to hinge on bouts of amnesia, a suicide, death-traps set to go off posthumously, and a somewhat unlikely partnership between a gigantic, workhouse-dwelling miscreant and George, the (non-resident) family cad. On the way through, I was thinking: This is the best Allingham I've read so far; on reaching the end, however, I wasn't so sure.

There are a couple of uncomfortable bits of racism. This is par for the course in 1930s crime fiction, as it was par for the course in everyday life (and still is, undoubtedly, only it's expressed differently...). In one case in this book, the attitudes expressed were probably very representative of their day -- a period 60 years before the current action commences -- and Campion does suggest that times have changed. In the other case, where an Indian student is glibly held up to ridicule, there's no equivalent distancing. Did the character need to be Indian, you have to ask...

And I wasn't sure what we were supposed to make of the indomitable Aunt Caroline. On the one hand, the fearless feistiness and sharp intelligence of this lace-bedecked little person are set up as something admirable, and we're supposed to be as wowed as Campion when she gifts him, at the end, a miniature depicting her former, lovely self. On the other hand, the fact remains that she makes everyone's life a misery... Her petty tyrannies outlaw morning tea, or an extra drop of whisky, decree who can sit where, and keep the household imprisoned in the Victorian era...

Still, I'll read on... Allingham always spins a good tale.


"I suppose the funeral will take place on Monday? Not a lot of flowers about at this time of year"