The Fashion in Shrouds by Margery Allingham

It is commonly assumed that, of all the writers of whodunit novels during that golden age of the 1920s and ‘30s, Agatha Christie was the unquestioned queen of them all.

Now, I haven’t read any of her works for a decade or two, and before long I shall remedy that and see if my opinion remains. But read a lot of Christie in my youth, until I reached an age where the prose, the characterisations and the snobbery of the authorial voice made it impossible for teenage me to continue. Her plotting may be second to none, but prose and characters do sort of matter.

And that is why Margery Allingham is the true queen of the whodunit, and Albert Campion a much better character than Hercule Poirot, with actual non-superficial character traits. The plotting may be excellent, but the characters are real people and the prose is wonderful- witty, ironic, joyous to read.

There are a couple of bits of dialogue that make one wince: there’s talk of colonial affairs in what was then the Gold Coast where the n-word is bandied about. The word wasn’t as taboo in 1938 as it is now, but one should not go to the other extreme in excusing it. The whiff of the forbidden surrounding the word may have been less strong than today, but it was their. It is, to say the least, unfortunate. Nor can one simply gloss over the fact that Campion tells his sister Val, who is “hysterical”, that she needs “a nice rape”.

Yet, such moments aside, this is a hugely enjoyable read, masterfully plotted and involving three dimensions characters. And this isn’t even a particularly well known example of Allingham’s Campion novels. I must read, or re-read, some more soon.