The Great Detectives: Albert Campion
by Mike
Ripley
GO BACK TO ARTICLES MAIN
PAGE
"His name is Albert
Campion,' she said. 'He came down in Anne Edgeware's
car, and the first thing he did when he was introduced
to me was to show me a conjuring trick with a two-headed
penny-he's quite inoffensive, just a silly
ass.'
Abbershaw nodded and stared covertly at the
fresh-faced young man with the tow-coloured hair and the
foolish, pale-blue eyes behind tortoiseshell-rimmed
spectacles, and wondered where he had seen him
before."
George Abbershaw had good reason to
wonder, and worry, about the arrival of the "silly ass"
Mr. Campion at Black Dudley, Suffolk in 1929 as, after
all, Abbershaw was supposed to be the hero of the story.
Sadly for Abbershaw, it was Albert Campion who endeared
himself to his creator and, perhaps more importantly, to
his creator's American editor at Doubleday who liked
Campion and demanded more.
The book was The Crime
At Black Dudley (The Black Dudley Murder in the US), the
first of eighteen Campion novels and dozens of short
stories that were to flow from the pen of Margery
Allingham over the next 37 years. Originally, Campion
was intended only as a minor criminal in the supporting
cast of Black Dudley. As the author herself said later
in life, he was "a mere muddying of the waters."
However, within a few years, Albert Campion had taken
his place alongside Hercule Poirot, Jane Marple, and
Lord Peter Wimsey as one of the great detectives of the
English "Golden Age" of crime writing and Margery
Allingham was ranked with Agatha Christie, Dorothy
Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh as one of the four great Queens
of the English mystery. Many said, and still do, that
she was the most versatile and entertaining of the
four.
Educated at Rugby and St. Ignatius College, Cambridge.
Embarked on adventurous career 1924. Name known to be a
pseudonym, but real identity hitherto unpublished.
Clubs: Puffin's, The Junior Greys. Hobbies: odd.
Address: 17 Bottle St, Piccadilly, London
W1."
Coincidentally, just as Lord Peter is
meeting and wooing Harriet Vane, the equally well-bred
Albert Campion is meeting his future wife, aircraft
engineer Amanda Fitton. There are other points of
comparison too. Wimsey is known to have spent time
overseas on vague secret missions for the government.
Albert Campion admits that he spent the war years
overseas " . . . on a mission so secret that even I
never discovered what it was." Where Lord Peter had a
loyal butler/batman and occasional Watson in the person
of Bunter, Albert Campion could boast the companionship
of reformed burglar Magersfontein Lugg, whom he once
described as a man " . . . having the courage of his
previous convictions" and who " . . . in spite of
magnificent qualities, has elements of the Oaf about
him." Where Wimsey is the second son of the Duke of
Denver, Campion goes one better and lets it slip that
his real name is Rudolph and it is not inconceivable
that he is somewhere in line for the English
Crown!
With these similarities in mind it might
be easy to think that Campion was merely a spoof of
Wimsey or that Margery Allingham was continually raising
the stakes in some literary poker game with Dorothy L.
Sayers (who, incidentally, lived less than a dozen miles
from Allingham, although the two seemed to have very
little to do with each other). Yet even though Albert
Campion may have started life as a gentle prod at Lord
Peter, Margery Allingham realised very quickly that she
had created an extremely versatile character, one who
eventually dominated her writing career and engaged
several generations of readers. Despite Campion's
primacy in her writing, Allingham never allowed herself
to fall in love with her character, a charge still
levelled at Sayers.
Campion may have given the
impression of an upper-class silly ass. With his easy,
affable manner and blank expression, he seemed an
unintimidating figure-as a policeman says in More Work
for the Undertaker (1949), "a man of whom at first sight
no one could be afraid. But when trouble would strike,
he would reliably rise to the occasion with
resourcefulness and intelligence, and, as Allingham was
not one to stick to a formula, he was allowed to
demonstrate his capabilities in a wide variety of
adventures. Her novels veered from straightforward
detective stories to gangland thrillers. Sometimes
Campion would be centre stage, sometimes in the wings.
On one notable occasion, in The Case of the Late Pig
(1937), Campion is the first person narrator and the
story starts in typical style:
"The main thing to
remember in autobiography, I have always thought, is not
to let any damned modesty creep in to spoil the story.
This adventure is mine, Albert Campion's, and I am
fairly certain that I was pretty near brilliant in it .
.."
This was the genius of the mind behind
Campion. When her purpose was simply to entertain,
Allingham let Campion play the part to the full. When
she wanted to make a serious point, Campion often, quite
happily, took a back seat. In another wartime adventure,
the 1941 novel Traitor's Purse (retitled The Sabotage
Murder Mystery in the US), Campion spends most of the
book with concussive amnesia, unable to remember who he
is, let alone what he is doing. The plot revolves around
counterfeit currency being printed and spread by the
Nazis to destabilise the British economy. The book was
written in 1940 when it seemed Britain stood alone
against overwhelming odds and the threat was very real.
It was not until many years later that Allingham learned
that there actually had been a plan called Operation
Bernhard-masterminded by Himmler's SS-to flood Britain
with fake money. The mood of the country and the times
was dark, so she placed her hero literally in the dark,
under a blanket of amnesia.
In perhaps her
greatest work, The Tiger in The Smoke (1952) (recently
picked by The Times as one of the Best 100 Mysteries of
the 20th Century) even the die-hard fan would admit that
Campion played second fiddle to the character of Jack
Havoc, the knife-wielding psychopathic villain. The plot
concerns the recovery of Britain after the Second World
War and the plight of a displaced generation of young
men whose only skill is violence, personified in the
character of Jack Havoc. It is a brilliant snapshot
photograph of life in Britain in 1951, a portrait which
would have been unthinkable in the immediate post-war
euphoria of 1945 and which, in turn, was probably
out-of-date by 1953. But in and of its own time it is
simply stunning. Once again, Mr. Campion plays it
straight, as the book has serious things to say about
the state of the nation at that time. The academic
Martin Priestman says of the book that it:
" . .
. deliberately juxtaposes Campion's upper-class world
with that of a working-class criminal gang whose lives
have been irrevocably warped by the Second World War,
from which the country as a whole is seen to be only
painfully recovering. The wider sense of a shattering of
shared values is mirrored in a fracturing of the book's
form, in which the traditional detective imperatives of
the whodunit are overshadowed by a thriller-like
absorbtion in the career of the gang's psychopathic
leader Jack Havoc, a rough beast slouching energetically
towards the Bethlehem of postwar welfare state
Britain."
It would be hard to envisage Lord Peter
Wimsey (or Hercule Poirot!) involved in such an
adventure, which not only works as an excellent thriller
but can, and should, be re-read as a nugget of social
history.
The versatility of Campion as a hero is
what earns him his place among the great detectives and,
at the same time, singles him out from most of his
contempories. It was a factor Allingham recognised early
on and noted in this introduction to Death Of A Ghost in
1934 (which is also on The Times' Best 100
list):
A NOTE ON MR ALBERT CAMPION
This
young man is an adventurer in the prettiest sense of the
word, and his activities, which I have chronicled for
some years, seem to fall into two distinct classes.
There are those which have been frankly picaresque, as
in the affair at Mystery Mile, the business at
Pontisbright, published under the title of Sweet Danger,
and several others. But now and again he comes up
against less highly coloured but even more grave
difficulties, as in the Cambridge tragedy, Police At the
Funeral, and now the present story.
The two types
of experience are distinct and it is perhaps surprising
that they should touch the same person. However, most of
us have a serious as well as a lighter side, and Mr.
Campion is no exception to the rule.
The crime
critic of The Sunday Times picked up on and praised this
aspect of Allingham's writing in her review of Death of
a Ghost, saying, "I think Miss Allingham gains by this
versatility. Her thrillers are the more convincing for
the habit of accuracy imposed on her by detective
writing, and her more intellectual problems enlivened by
the sense of colour and movement that invades them from
the thriller side of her mental make-up. This would not
happen to anybody but a very good writer, and her
writing is, in fact, excellent." The reviewer was none
other than Dorothy L. Sayers who, if she noticed any
similarities between the early appearances of Campion
and her own beloved Lord Peter, chose to ignore them-at
least in her Sunday Times column.
Yet that
versatility, which was to make Campion an evergreen hero
for another thirty years, was not accepted by all the
critics. The renowned Julian Symons noted that Campion
played a smaller part in the later books (from 1950
onwards) and that "good as they are they would have been
better still without the presence of the detective who
belonged to an earlier time and a different tradition."
A harsh judgement which would be disputed by Campion
fans, but one which could fairly be levelled at the
Campion books had they depended solely on Campion's
constant presence for the solving of their puzzles. (It
is, after all, Hercule Poriot's little grey cells which
are important in his cases, not what is happening in the
world outside the closed circle of suspects.
The
Campion books had much more than a hero. They had a hero
who aged, who matured, who moved-sometimes
reluctantly-with the times. The detective who, in the
1930's, would quite happily introduce himself as
"Tootles Ash" and cheerfully claim kinship with Bertie
Wooster, was, by 1945, a quieter, more studied
world-weary operator. In his first appearance after
World War II, in Coroner's Pidgin (Pearls Before Swine
in the US), "there were new lines in his over-thin face
and with their appearance some of his old misleading
vacancy of expression had vanished." Even later, in
Cargo of Eagles in 1966, which was unfinished at the
time of Allingham's death at the age of 62, Campion is
described as "tall and fair, but he was over-thin and
the careful veil of affable vacuity which had begun,
like his large spectacles, as a protection, and had
become a second skin, had robbed him of good
looks."
Campion was certainly not a superhero,
nor an unemotional thinking machine. He was often bested
in fights, which Allingham could describe with real
menace. In Look To The Lady in 1931, Campion is attacked
by the villainous "Mrs. Dick" and thrown into a stable
with a mad horse in a scene which still zings seventy
years later. By the time of The Mind Readers in 1965,
Campion is genuinely frightened and struggles to keep
his wits about him-he is getting too old for this-when
confronted in unarmed combat by a vastly superior
opponent.
As Campion matured, so did his
entourage, each one cementing links to the reading
public-Amanda Fitton (who later became his wife), their
son Rupert, a host of assorted relatives, his police
contacts Stanislaus Oates and Charles Luke, and of
course L.C. Corkran (or "Elsie" in typical Campionesque
style) who belonged to a mysterious intelligence outfit
known only as The Department. All of them grew and aged
alongside the hero and alongside the public-with the
possible exception of Lugg the manservant, who remained
incorrigibly Lugg to the end. This was indeed an
unparalleled cast of characters and one which served
Allingham well during a sterling
career.
Throughout the variety of plots, which
covered the worlds of art, fashion, the theatre,
espionage, smuggling, and buried treasure (often with a
touch of the Gothic thrown in, Allingham having been
much influenced in her youth by Robert Louis Stevenson),
there was, always a sense of place. Perhaps her most
famous setting was the mixture of Suffolk countryside
and Essex coastal salt marsh which first appeared in
Mystery Mile and which became known among her circle of
friends as "Margeland." The villages of Pontisbright in
Sweet Danger, Saltey and Mob's Bowl in Cargo Of Eagles,
and "Boffin Island" in The Mind Readers were inspired by
the northeast Essex countryside where Margery Allingham
spent most of her life. Many of the locations survive in
recognisable form to this day, notably Kersey in Suffolk
and Osea and Mersea Islands off the Essex coast. She was
equally good at describing Cambridge, fog-bound London,
and closed family communities such as the one in More
Work for the Undertaker (1948), a book which, according
to Robert Barnard (an expert on, and advocate of, Agatha
Christie), exhibited " . . .a marvelous sense of place .
. .," and he goes on to say that "her portrayal of a
family of decaying intellectuals is both alarming and
touching."
It is, to be honest, the people and
places in the Campion books which inspire devotion
rather than Campion's stature as a great detective in
the vein of Poirot or Holmes. Perhaps great character
would be a better description, or even favourite
detective, for it is surely impossible not to like
Albert Campion. He is certainly a believable character,
as shown by one of Allingham's most treasured fan
letters sent from a prisoner-of-war camp in 1943 and
addressed simply to "Mr. Albert Campion, 17A Bottle
Street, London."
Many assumed that Campion was
based on his creator's husband, "Pip" Youngman Carter-an
artist, editor, illustrator, and wine writer, among
other things-who completed Cargo Of Eagles and went on
to write Mr. Campion's Falcon and Mr. Campion's Farthing
after Allingham's death. Yet Allingham scotched this
particular rumour by clearly depicting Pip and herself
as Tonker and Minnie Cassands, owners of the pub The
Beckoning Lady, in her 1955 novel of the same name.
Allingham herself spread the story that Campion was
based on the Duke of York (who was to become King George
VI) but almost certainly she did this with a smile on
her face.
The truth is probably that Campion
started as an archetype of the young, smart, "gay set"
which enjoyed country house weekends, large fast
open-top cars, and "getting into scrapes." He developed
into a rounded and sympathetic character despite, rather
than because of, the advantages of his birth. That he
was allowed to do so-and that his fans accepted it so
well-was a mark of Allingham's skill as a writer and,
more importantly, a writer who refused to take the
concept of a great detective too seriously. For me, this
is why Campion really is one of the great characters of
the so-called Golden Age of 1930's English crime writing
and Margery Allingham is the best female writer to
emerge from-or survive-that era.
The Campion
books are read and re-read by people who wish to follow
the fortunes of the hero and his extended family as he
and they develop over the years, and by people who want
to get the feel of a place (sometimes a place where evil
lurks not far below the surface), and by people who
simply want to be entertained by a writer who enjoyed
writing. I cannot think of a single Campion tale where
it really matters "whodunit." What I remember are the
scenes along the way: the ritual of the dagger at Black
Dudley, the final terrifying climax of Look To The Lady
with its touch of Gothic horror, the practical
Undertakers of 12 Apron Street headed by Jas Bowels, the
street musicians playing their way through a London
pea-soup fog in Tiger In The Smoke . . .
Every
Campion story, as Agatha Christie once said, was
"distinctive" and did not rely simply on a plot twist
for its impact. Can you imagine saying the same thing
about many of the other works that were to emerge from
that same era? Of course I am biased. Not only do I live
in Campion/Allingham country, in the northeast of Essex,
but I have met Albert Campion! It was, I should admit,
Albert Campion as played by Peter Davison (shadowed by
the marvellous Brian Glover as Lugg), on location for
the BBC production of Look To The Lady, one of eight
Campion novels adapted for television over ten years
ago.
My claim to fame was that at the time I
worked in the brewing business and the producers wanted
an expert to tell them how the bar of the pub The Three
Drummers would have looked circa 1931. Having already
acted as an advisor on a TV film in the Sherlock Holmes
series, recreating a rural pub in Sussex in 1902, my
name somehow got into the Campion frame. I was more than
happy to oblige. Filming took place in the village of
Kersey in Suffolk, though the climax was shot at the
famous Layer Marney Tower some miles away in Essex. I
think Margery Allingham would have approved of the BBC
production and of Davison, yet only those three films
were made and to the best of my knowledge they have not
been seen in the UK for over a decade, even though
Davison was (and is) a bankable TV and theatre
star.
Against the consistent flow of consistently
good TV adaptations of Poirot and Miss Marple, plus two
memorable interpretations of Lord Peter Wimsey by Ian
Carmichael and Edward Petherbridge, not to mention the
dominance of Sherlock Holmes and then, since 1987, of
Inspector Morse, it is perhaps not surprising that
Campion is not as widely known a fictional detective as
he should be. This is sad and curious, but perhaps not
surprising given the vagaries of television production.
Not that Campion fared much better on the larger screen.
When a film version of Hide My Eyes was being discussed
in 1958, it was mooted that the star would be a young
"pop" singer called Cliff Richards-nowadays the ageless,
born-again Sir Cliff.
Thankfully, that film never
got made, although The Tiger In The Smoke was filmed in
1956, starring a handsome young ingenue, Tony Wright, as
the psychopathic Jack Havoc. To build the film into a
star vehicle for Wright, the scriptwriters and producers
took the expedient route of removing the character of
Albert Campion entirely! Whatever Margery Allingham
thought about this is not recorded, but I have a
sneaking suspicion that Albert Campion himself would
have chuckled with glee, and then somehow negotiated a
remake which would have won an Oscar. For the one thing
you learn about Albert Campion is never to be fooled by
first appearances.
In her last novel Margery
Allingham wrote, perhaps unconsciously, the perfect
obituary of her hero: "In his own apologetic way Mr.
Campion was a celebrated figure. In his time he had
performed a number of services for a great many causes.
He was a negotiator and an unraveller of knots and there
were still people who suspected, because of his wartime
activities, that he had a cloak and a dagger somewhere
concealed. Those who disliked him complained that he
seemed negligible until it was just too
late."
THE ENDGO BACK TO ARTICLES MAIN
PAGESubscribe!
•
One Year: $19.95 (reg.
$24.95) •
Two Years: $34.95 (reg.
$39.95) 
