‘I’ve told him that I’ll outlive him if I have to die to do it.’
(John Lafcadio, the painter and humourist)

‘I agree with Max entirely,’ she said. ‘Too many people imagine they know something about Art.’
(Donna Beatrice, the voice of the art snob)

‘I don’t like that type, though. Exhibitionists they’re called, aren’t they?’
(The early days of popular psychology)

‘Very lowerin’ to the locality,’ said Mr Pudney, adding darkly, ‘artists mean models.’
(The popular view)

Campion looked down at her. The world was reeling. This was the last development he had expected, the last eventuality for which he had been prepared.
(Allingham’s characteristically over-wrought tone)

‘I don’t know why I’ve come to you, Albert. I don’t know what I expect you to do,’ she burst out suddenly.
(Well, probably solve the case, as he usually does)

Margery Allingam’s first Albert Campion novel overflows with facetious high spirits and melodrama, it’s a ridiculously pulp adventure told in a breathless style. Jumping to this, the sixth one (once she got going she wrote them very quickly, sometimes two a year) I was struck by how wordy and pompous her style had become, so pompous that it often teeters on incoherence.

The chief deterrent to private killing, he reflected, was probably the ingrained superstitious fear of the responsibility of ending a human life, but in a man of Max’s inordinate conceit this objection could no doubt be swept away by being decided a necessity.

It makes sense, but only just, and only if the reader does a little work to help it along.

The gentle procession of ordinary life swept them all along, and it began to seem as unlikely that violence would ever again assail Lafcadio’s household as it had done on that Saturday evening when he and Belle had discussed the morrow’s reception.

‘Assail’? ‘Morrow’?

His naturally picturesque appearance was considerably exaggerated by his latest sartorial fad, consisting somewhat astonishingly of a fully coloured Victorian fancy waistcoat. This gallant vestment was without question a thing of beauty.

‘Gallant vestment’?

Five minutes later, as they sat round sipping out of the famous crackleware cups mentioned in so many books of reminiscence, the sensation of calamity which had returned to Mr Campion as he came up the staircase burst into his fullest mind.

‘Fullest mind’?

When one considered Max Fustian’s appearance it was all the more extraordinary that his personality, exotic and fantastic as it was, should never have overstepped the verge into the ridiculous.

‘Overstepped the verge’? I found collecting these dubious phrases far more interesting than the supposed plot.

Max shrugged his shoulders, a gesture almost contortionate, but having made his protest he gave way gracefully.

At the moment her pallor was almost startling, and her eyes beneath her thick brows were burning with nothing less than ferocity.

She bustled off, leaving a tang of schoolmistress in the air.

Looking at the newcomer, Mr Campion felt again a liking for this naïve, friendly spirit who regarded the world as an odd sort of party upon which he had dropped in by mistake.

Today, in a little old forgotten corner of our wonderful London, the ghost of a great artist, thought by some to be the greatest artist of our time, entertains the glass of fashion and the mould of form for the eighth time in a twelve-year programme.

‘The mould of form’?

Mrs Potter wondered if the beads of sweat had rolled down under her fringe. The chattering old gossip seemed to have become a fiend possessed of super-human insight in the power to wrest truth from its well.

‘Super-human insight in the power to wrest truth from its well’?

The scene he indicated was amusing. Donna Beatrice was talking volubly to Max Fustian. Knowing her, Mr Campion shuddered to think of the matter of her discourse.

At moments like this I think Allingham is trying to sound elegant and sophisticated to match the upper-class Bohemian setting of the story, and her sentences superficially have the structure and feel of sophistication – until you actually read what she’s written, at which point the effect vanishes.

The theory that the art of conversation has died out in modern times is either a gross misrepresentation of the facts or an Olympian criticism of quality alone. Three quarters of the gathering seemed to be talking loudly, not so much with the strain of one trying to capture an audience, but with the superb flow of the man who knows all creation is trying to hear him.

He came up to Belle, who greeted him with that delight which was half her charm.

Belle seemed loath to speak, but Donna Beatrice sailed in with an eagerness that was frankly uncharitable.

Or take this phrase which doesn’t quite make sense, is not quite grammatically accurate.

A few of the die-hard school of manners clung to their standards and talked together quietly, affecting not to have noticed this second disturbance…

Surely it should be something like ‘A few members of the die-hard school of manners…’ And what about this odd and clunky phrasing?

He was still undecided on his course of action and never remembered finding himself in a similar quandary.

And anyway, these attempts at mellifluous urbanity are only a veneer. Continually breaking through is Allingham’s more habitual tone of melodrama and hyperbole:

The little woman in the tight purple dress was staring at him, her yellow face a mask of horror.

She began to sob noisily, great gulping animal sounds which whipped the already jolted nerves of the company to the point of agony.

The Belle Darling whom Lafcadio had loved, protected, and leant upon was beaten to her knees by the deluge of horror poured down upon her.

He hurried over to Belle, who was standing in her place by the door, superbly gallant and unruffled in the nightmare crisis.

It took Max just those three seconds to get across the room and seize the girl by the arms, while the shocked silence in the room deepened into a growing perception of horror.

Campion noticed with growing concern, there was a new note in the general air of frustration and despair which was his general atmosphere: the high thin note of alarm.

Mr Campion was prepared for the worst, and her words sent a thrill of horror down his spine.

It’s this silly tone of Gothic melodrama which appeals to Allingham’s fans but puts my teeth on edge. And it’s not even convincingly written melodrama. As a writer, she seems to have only a shaky grasp of her sentence structure. She is frequently clumsy and clunky.

Looking at him posturing in the dusty sunlight, it occurred to her that it was really remarkable that he should not appear very ridiculous. She thought also that this was certainly not the case.

The moment was one of drama, and those minds which had hastily dismissed Rosa-Rosa’s outburst as a regrettable, hysterical, or drunken incident suddenly wheeled round to face the half-formed fear which had secretly assailed them all.

She went on, still leaning heavily on the doctor’s arm, while they listened to her breathlessly with that sinking of the heart and faint sense of nausea which always comes just before the worst is told.

Everything is overlit and over-wrought:

He dreaded the meeting with the family. Belle, he knew, looked to him for comfort, and in the circumstances he had very little to offer her. The cold air of calamity had permeated the whole household.

This tottering, unsteady melodramatic tone really, really makes you appreciate Agatha Christie’s brisk professional prose style all the more. Christie, too, of course, has sudden murders, shocked hostesses, stunned guests and whatnot. But she uses crisp short sentences which are so much more effective at a) drawing you in and b) painting the scene, even when she herself is being dramatic.

The noise drew nearer. It consisted of shrill cries and protests in a woman’s voice. The door at the end of the dining-car burst open. Mrs Hubbard burst in. (Murder on the Orient Express)

Less is more.

Plot summary

The plot? It is March 1930 and we are in the household of the long-dead artist John Lafcadio who, back in the 1890s, was considered the greatest artist in Britain. Now, 19 years after his death (in 1911), his house, his artist’s studio in Little Venice, and his memory are kept alive by his circle, which includes his widow (Belle Lafcadio), a former model (Donna Beatrice), his paint mixer (Fred Rennie), the art dealer and critic who’s made a career out of writing books about him (Max Fustian), his grand-daughter the tempestuous Linda (25), who’s in love with handsome Tom Dacre (37), who’s just returned from Italy with a brainless model in tow (Rosa-Rosa Rosini), and half a dozen others.

Before his death, Lafcadio had a humorous idea which was to stash away 12 completed and impressive paintings and, ten years after his death, have his widow release them, one a year, with a formal unveiling party before each one is sent to the Royal Academy Summer exhibition.

The novel opens with a couple of chapters introducing us, in Allingham’s usual wordy manner, to the dozen or so members of the Lafcadio household, and hinting at their various jealousies and resentments – all witnessed by the mysterious Albert Campion, who is an old friend of the widow’s.

But then we get onto The Murder: at the height of the very posh reception for this year’s posthumous Lafcadio painting (attended by a bishop, an ambassador and sundry other society nobs) the lights in the studio go out (because they’re on a meter) and a young man, Thomas Dacre – himself an artist and recently returned from Italy with a stunning if brainless model in tow – is stabbed to death with a pair of ornamental scissors.

Campion was outside in the corridor popping another sixpence in the electric meter. When the lights go back on he returns to an exhibition room in uproar. That is the murder. Whodunnit?

Campion’s friend from Scotland Yard, Inspector Stanislaus Oates, is called in, interviews all the guests, and quickly concludes that the Lafcadio household, with its collection of haunted old women, former models and hangers-on, is like a lunatic asylum.

It’s all so different from Agatha Christie. Christie’s novels are so pared back that they sometimes feel like engineer or architect’s designs for a novel. There is a tremendous clarity, and also repetitiveness, to the way Poirot calls in all the suspects of the murder on the Orient Express or on the Nile steamship, one by one, discovering (almost) everything about their background and character and relationship with the deceased. It’s like a diagram with certain key pieces missing which the reader is invited to fill in. And all told in a prose style which became more clipped and functionally effective as she grew into her style.

Allingham is completely different. Her plots are as confusing and clumsy as her prose style. There’s a murder and a relatively small group of suspects but the explanation of who, why and what, is extremely muddy and confused. The impulsive grand-daughter, Linda, was engaged to the murdered man and furious to discover he married his Italian model in Italy. Campion discovers that one of the old ladies in the household, Lisa, in a fit of anger had attacked the widow, Belle, with a pair of scissors leaving permanent scars. But somehow neither of these stories feel very compelling.

Campion’s involvement feels arbitrary and episodic. Poirot is called in by the cops to help. Campion seems to happen to be hanging around because he’s an old friend of the family. Is that his connection in all of his crime novels? It feels very tangential and arbitrary.

I didn’t understand why the police investigation was slowly dropped (was it because the presence of an ambassador at the reception would have embarrassed the Foreign Office?) The narrative implies that the murder enquiry is simply dropped. but surely that’s improbable.

So I wasn’t much puzzled about the crime and the so-called mystery. I was much more puzzled by Allingham’s strange, clumsy, round-the-houses, mystifying treatment of it. I found it hard to stop reading Agatha Christie novels, whereas I found it a real struggle to finish Margery Allingham’s books, they’re unsatisfying on so many levels.

There’s a second murder, Mrs Potter, the harmless long-suffering wife of failed artist Tennyson Potter. She has no value in herself but clearly saw or knows something which can identify the murderer, and so she has to go. And so Chapter 15 opens:

Mr Campion knew that Max Fustian had killed Mrs Potter as soon as he saw him that evening. He did not arrive at this conclusion by the decent process of quiet, logical deduction, nor yet by the blinding flash of glorious intuition, but by the shoddy, untidy process halfway between the two by which one usually gets to know things.

‘The shoddy, untidy process’ – used to the clarity of Christie’s murder mysteries, I think it’s the scrappy untidiness of Allingham’s books which I find tiresome and frustrating.

Cast

• John ‘Johnnie’ Lafcadio – deceased painter, eminent in the 1890s
• Mrs Belle Lafcadio – his widow, approaching 70, kindly, intelligent, always described as ‘plump’
• Donna Beatrice, real name Harriet Pickering – ‘a lady who had caused a certain amount of flutter in artistic circles in 1900’ – ‘a widow with a small income and an infinite capacity for sitting still and looking lovely’ – nowadays uses a hearing aid – into psychomancy and auras etc
• Lisa Cappella – model for such famous Lafcadio paintings as Clytemnestra and the Girl at the Pool, now much reduced as an old servant
• Max Fustian – art dealer, owner of the Salmon Galleries in Bond Street, and critic who’s built a career writing eight books about Lafcadio’s work – ‘He was small, dark, pale, with a blue jowl and a big nose. His eyes, which were bright and simian, peered out from cavernous sockets, so dark as to appear painted. His black hair was ungreased and cut into a conventional shock which had just sufficient length to look like a wig. He was dressed, too, with the same mixture of care and unconventionality. His double-breasted black coat was slightly loose, and his soft black tie flowed from beneath his white silk collar… He was forty, but looked younger and appreciated his good fortune’
  • Isidore Levy – the astute, thickset gentleman who helped manage Max Fustian’s Bond Street business
  • Mr Green – teenage boy who packs the art works
• Tennyson Potter – failed artist, inventor of engraving on red sandstone which never caught on – ‘a thin red melancholy face whose wet pale eyes were set too close together above the pinched bridge of an enormous nose’ – ‘His thin red face with its enormous nose and watery eyes…’
• Mrs Claire Potter – ‘a little, dowdy woman with iron-grey bobbed hair, capable hands, and an air of brisk practicalness which stamped her at once as one of those efficient handmaids-of-all-work to the arts who are capable of undertaking any little commission from the discovery of a Currier & Ives to the chaperoning of a party of society-girl students across Europe’
• Lisa Capella, discovered by Lafcadio on the slopes outside Veccia one morning in 1884, had been brought by him to England, where she occupied the position of principal model until her beauty passed, when she took up the household duties for Belle, to whom she was deeply attached. Now, at the age of sixty-five, she looked much older, a withered, rather terrible old woman with a wrinkled brown face, quick, dark, angry eyes, and very white hair scraped back from her forehead. She was dressed completely in black, the dead and clinging folds which enveloped her only relieved by a gold chain and brooch’
• Linda – John Lafcadio’s granddaughter, daughter of Belle’s only son, killed at Gallipoli in 1916 – ‘a strongly made, tempestuous young woman of twenty-five who bore a notable resemblance to her grandfather’ – engaged to…
• Thomas Dacre – ‘a man of great ability, thirty-seven years old, unrecognized and obsessed by his own shortcomings, resembled a battered, careworn edition of the Apollo Belvedere in horn-rimmed spectacles. He was one of that vast army of young men who had had five all-important years cut out of their lives by the war, and who bitterly resented the fact without altogether realizing it. Dacre’s natural disbelief in himself had been enhanced by severe shell-shock, which had left him capable of making any sacrifice to the furtherance of his creature comforts
• Rosa-Rosa Rosini – beautiful young woman Dacre has brought back from Italy to be a model – Linda is furious because she thinks he’s married her in Italy – ‘the figure of a John gipsy and the face of a fiend’ – ‘Like all natural models she moved very little and then only to drop from one attitude into another, which she held with remarkable faithfulness’ – ‘Rosa-Rosa had another of the perfect model’s peculiarities; she was unbelievably stupid. She had been trained not to think, lest her roving fancy should destroy the expression she was holding. For the best part of her life, therefore, her mind remained a complete blank’ – connected to a London crime family, the Rosinis, based around Saffron Hill
• Fred Rennie – plucked as a child from a working class background by Lafcadio and taught to be his colour mixer, still lives and pursues his alchemical trade in the converted coach house
• Brigadier General Sir Walter Fyvie
• Bernard, bishop of Mould
• Albert Campion
• Sir Gordon Woodthorpe – that eminent society physician’ who attends the dead body
• Inspector Stanislaus Oates – Campion’s most reliable contact at Scotland Yard – always fiddling with his moustache
• Constable Bainbridge –
• Downing – plain clothes policeman
• Matt D’Urfey – friend of murdered Tommy – ‘loosely but strongly built, wide of shoulder and narrow of hip, with faded hair, a big characterful nose, and shy dancing blue eyes’ – does ‘pen drawings’
• Sir Edgar Berwick – the politician and client of Fustian’s – ‘an oldish man, large and remarkably dignified. His skin was pink and his natural expression belligerent. At the moment he looked important and extremely wise. He also appeared to be aware of the fact’
• Miss Florence Cunninghame – ‘was plump, ladylike, elderly, and quite remarkably without talent. Her tweed coat and skirt, silk blouse and pull-on hat might have belonged to any provincial schoolmistress. She had money of her own and an insatiable passion for painting water-colours’
• Young Dr Fettes – ‘a quiet, square young man with bushy black hair growing low down over his forehead and the gift of looking blank without appearing foolish’
• Dr Derrick – his assistant, ‘a sandy-haired young man with a blue suspicious eye’
• Derek Fayre – ‘the cartoonist, whose bitter, slightly obscene drawings appeared occasionally in the more highbrow weeklies’
• William Pudney – landlord of the White Lion pub in the Essex village of Heronhoe – ‘a spare, pink, youngish man with a masterpiece of an accent which betrayed at once both his ambitions in this direction and his complete lack of the ear by which to attain them’
• Lady du Vallon – ‘a crisp little woman with sharp eyes and red elf-locks’
• Sir Gervaise Pelley – the Cellini authority
• Bee Birch – the militant painter of athletes
• Joseph – ‘the pontifical head waiter’ of Savarini’s, the fashionable restaurant of the moment
• Chatters – doorman of Campion’s club Chatters
• Braybridge – police psychiatrist

The mysterious Mr Campion

Very few people knew much about Mr Campion. In the first place, that was not his name. The majority of his friends and acquaintances knew vaguely that he was the younger son of some personage, who had taken up the adventurous calling of an unofficial investigator and universal uncle at first as a hobby and finally as a career. His successes were numerous, but for the best reasons in the world he remained in the background and avoided publicity like the plague. (Chapter 4)

Aspects of Campion

Long thin legs. Long fingers. Pales eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses.

The pale young man in the horn-rimmed spectacles remained unusually serious.

Mr Campion regarded her mildly through his enormous spectacles.

He stood for a moment looking at the cottage and then stepped forward, his lank figure casting a very small shadow in the bright cold sunlight.

His character:

Albert Campion wandered into the room looking his usual vacant, affable self.

Mr Campion had a gentle, kindly personality and was possessed of infinite patience.

Mr Campion… had the wit to make a study of men without considering himself a connoisseur of humanity…

Complicating:

In the last case they had worked on together, Mr Campion’s fantastic theory had been correct, and the inspector, who was a superstitious man in spite of his calling, had begun to regard his friend as a sort of voodoo who by his mere presence transformed the most straightforward cases into tortuous labyrinths of unexpected events.

This is exactly the same accusation made by Inspector Japp against Hercule Poirot in novel after novel. That everywhere he goes, simple cases become tortuously complicated. Christie even uses the same word.

‘It was odd, very odd, that the room should smell – as it did, perfectly fresh.’
‘So that’s what you were getting at!’ Japp sighed. ‘Always have to get at things in such a tortuous way.’ (Murder in the Mews, Chapter 10)

One sentence epitomises the transformation in Campion’s character from the high-voiced, facetious poseur of the first novel and this later one:

Campion was as earnest as he had ever been. The vacuity had vanished from his face, leaving him unexpectedly capable.

Truisms

I’ve noted in my Christie reviews how it’s part of the tradition of ‘the Novel’ to drop wise sayings and apothegms about human nature into their narratives, in the way that Bible quotes and Christian sayings comforted pre-modern generations. Both the narrator and characters can, at the drop of a hat, launch into sententious generalisations about human nature, men, women etc etc.

Outrage, combining as it does shock, anger, reproach, and helplessness, is perhaps the most unmanageable, the most demoralizing, of all the emotions.

When the habitually even-tempered suddenly fly into a passion, that explosion is apt to be more impressive than the outburst of the most violent amongst us.

Miss Cunninghame went on with the dreadful eagerness of one who has broken the ice of a difficult subject.

But I came to think these kinds of wisdom generalisations perhaps have another motive, which is to flatter the reader into thinking themselves wise. ‘Yes, yes, you nod, I knew that about human nature. People this, people that, of course of course.’ Although even this aspect of the novel Allingham struggles with:

Campion was prepared for a painful experience, but even so the sight which Mr Potter presented as he sat up in the big Italian bed, propped by the glistening pillows, had in it that element of the unexpectedly shocking which is the very essence of embarrassment.

Which is the very essence of incoherence.

As the sensation died away and the atmosphere of Little Venice subsided once more into a false peace the younger man at any rate experienced the sensations of a maiden lady who sees the burglar’s boots below the curtain as the last of the neighbours troop back to their homes after the false alarm…

The drunk chapter

Credit where credit’s due, though. The second half of the novel deserves a review of its own because in it Allingham develops an interesting idea, which is then the basis for a surprisingly effective chapter / passage / scene.

This is that about half-way through the story, Campion becomes convinced that Max Fustian, the preening egotistical art dealer, is the killer. His motivation is a clever scam the reader didn’t see coming and is, unlike most Christie plots, both ingenious but also plausible.

And the sequence it leads up to is this: Campion gathers evidence from various sources strongly suggesting Fustian is responsible but, in conversation with Inspector Oates, agree there is no actual hard evidence. He will have to be caught in the act of his next murder. And with this in mind Campion drops broad hints to Fustian that he both knows he is the murderer, and understands his (very profitable) motive. In his suave smooth way, Fustian invites Campion out for the evening to discuss the matter.

First of all he asks him to join him at a book launch, where Fustian makes a big point of being loudly dressed and making loud remarks and being seen with Campion, presumably to establish what good pals they are. Then at the end of the reception invites him back to his apartment in Baker Street, and offers him a cocktail, while he gets dressed for dinner. Campion suspects the cocktail is drugged, especially after Fustian makes a big point of adding a ‘special’ cherry to it.

But it’s when Fustian then takes him on to dinner at London’s most fashionable restaurant, Savarini’s, that what I’m talking about really kicks off. Fustian gets him drunk, really drunk, howlingly drunk, by lavishing on him a rare and precious wine which must not be consumed after you’ve drunk gin, knowing that Campion downed a number of gin-based cocktails at the book launch, and back at his flat.

It’s an ingenious plan because his alibi is that he’s seen wining and dining Campion, the best of friends, as his alibi. But what makes the chapter, chapter 24, really notable, is the extended description of Campion’s drunkenness seen through his own eyes, as he blunders out of the restaurant, Fustian steer him to his club (in order for there to be plenty of witnesses to his howling drunkenness) before steering him through the West End and down into a tube station at maximum rush hour and right to the front of a packed platform, so that he is drunkenly teetering right on the edge as the Tube train comes hurtling into the station, and he feels Fustian behind him, right behind him, waiting for just the right moment to accidentally on purpose push him in front of the hurtling train.

This extended passage is really good, very effective at what it sets out to do, genuinely gripping – maybe because Allingham drops all pretence of fine writing and witty sayings, dodgy generalisations about human nature and all the rest of the affectations which mar her usual style, and just focuses on this one thing, describing a drunk’s progress through the West End in a compelling way.

Related link

• Death of a Ghost online

Related reviews

• Agatha Christie reviews