Margery Allingham, originally published 1937

I would say that Margery Allingham is an author who does not get enough credit for her work. She is one of the ‘Queens of Crime’, yes but rarely would I guess her name is the first name that would come to someone’s mind when listing Classic Crime authors. Third or fourth maybe. Not only is her detective figure, Albert Campion, one who is likable and who grows over the course of the novels, but her plots are fun and fast paced and she often experiments with style and narrative voice in her novels too. Some like The Case of the Late Pig are told in first person, others in third person, and one is told in first person by a narrator who does not even himself know who he is.

Allingham also has a delightful way with words. The below, from The Case of the Late Pig, I was so delighted on reading it, that I ended up describing it to a friend, butchering it as I did.

“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.”

The plot of the Late Pig is just as clever, if slightly convoluted, involving a man (the titular Pig) dying multiple times, to the great confusion of Campion, anonymous letters relating to a ‘mole’ and a Miss Effie Rowlandson: “She was petite, blonde and girlish, with starry eyes and the teeth of a toothpaste advertisements. Her costume was entirely black save for a long white quill in her hat, and the general effect lay somewhere between Hamlet and Aladdin.”

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A chunk of the plot relies on the “the truth, the body of one fat man is much like the body of another once the features are obliterated…” which adds fat men to the list of people that many in the mid-twentieth century struggle to distinguish between – Old women, maids, old maids, anyone not white and middleclass…

With the action happening in a small village, we are given a limited circle of potential murderers, though slightly larger than usual with people re-appearing to die again and visitors coming and going. The crime is solved in a dramatic fashion, with the much loveable Lugg being in great danger at the crux of the novel, leading to some fast paced reading to make sure that he was going to be ok! I was pretty sure he would be, being Lugg and all, but you just never know.