Forgotten Book - The Fashion in Shrouds

The description "forgotten book" is, to be honest, a misnomer when it comes to Margery Allingham's 1938 novel The Fashion in Shrouds. The famous Observer critic Torquemada extolled the book, saying, "To Albert Campion has fallen the honour of being the first detective to figure in a story which is also by any standard a distinguished novel". I'm not sure whether Dorothy L.Sayers would have agreed; perhaps she'd have thought that she'd beaten her friend Allingham to that particular achievement. But it's undeniably a stylish novel.

Time and again there are pleasing and inventive turns of phrase, of a kind that one doesn't usually find in the typical Golden Age mystery. What's more, the presentation of the fashion world, which provides, in the early stages of the story, an interesting setting, is convincing. Allingham's presentation of character generally avoids the usual cliches, and the relationship Campion has with the lovely young Amanda Fitton is quite subtly done.

It's not easy to read this book in the precisely way that readers in 1938 would have read it. There's a good deal about social class, and the role of women in society, that relates to the time, and although Allingham handles these issues in a thoughtful way, so much has changed. Overall, I did not find these aspects of the book to be as compelling as some of her admirers suggest. For me, as with Sayers' Gaudy Night, Fashion in Shrouds does sacrifice something in the attempt at literary sophistication. The plot simply isn't as exciting as, say, the plot of Christie's The ABC Murders or Wade's Lonely Magdalen.- and the latter also offers a fascinating picture of society, and the role of police in enforcing the law.

What of the story? The amoral Georgia Wells poses a threat to the relationship between Campion's sister Valentine and Alan Dell (for whose company Amanda works).Georgia's husband is murdered, and the fate of his predecessor also comes under the microscope. But the plot is secondary, I think, and for that reason I don't feel tempted to rave about this book in the way its most ardent fans do. Even so, I enjoyed reading it, and as Torquemada said, the writing is distinguished.

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The Running Heroine - guest blog by Jessica Mann

The competing merits of stand-alone and series crime novels is a topic of perennial interest, and I'm delighted to say that Jessica Mann is today contributing a guest blog on this very topic.

"Off the top of your head how many crime writers can you think of whose books are all stand alone? In fact, can you think of any? Because even those who started with one-offs usually move on to re-using the same characters, as HRF Keating, did when the first Inspector Ghote followed five stand-alones. Authors can be bored by their running heroes, as Christie seemed to become with Poirot.  Lindsey Davis and Val McDermid  both gave themselves breaks recently , each writing a one-off novels, but then returned to their series characters, in, almost by definition, “series places”.

Other writers feature not so much series as recurring places and people. One is Michael Gilbert, of whom Martin Edwards wrote , “It is a feature of this author’s work that he regularly created fresh and engaging characters who would pop up in various novels and short stories, without any one achieving dominance.” Characters, and  places: having adopted Thomas Hardy’s cathedral city of Melchester in his first book, Close Quarters, he  revived that scene of crime thirty years later  in The Black Seraphim.   

I enjoy these surprise encounters even  more than meeting reliable old favorites. It was fun when Margery Allingham’s Amanda Fitton,  introduced  in  one of the  early, more light-hearted crime novels,  reappeared half a dozen books later in The Fashion In Shrouds,  after which she’s a fixture. Agatha Christie’s return to Hercule Poirot in her last book, Curtain, is in  a different category, as she wrote the book many years earlier and put it aside for later publication.

Minor characters reappear in my own books; and some  are connected by   series heroines.   Professor Thea Crawford,  reluctant detective in The Only Security and Captive Audience, plays a small part  in subsequent novels featuring her former  pupil,  the archaeologist Tamara Hoyland. Both of them know   Dr Fidelis Berlin, introduced  in A Private Inquiry, and taking  a minor role in Under A Dark Sun and a major one in The Voice From The Grave.

The  heroes and heroines of crime fiction  often grow up (as Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion did)  even reach retirement age, like Ian Rankin’s Rebus, but they usually remain vigorous and influential, as did Ngaio Marsh’s Alleyn. Very few  detective heroes  grow realistically old, though Ruth Rendell’s Wexford,  Peter Dickinson’s Pibble and Hercule Poirot do.

And I hope the septuagenarian Fidelis is credible  in my new book, Dead Woman Walking. One of its minor  characters, a young Isabel Drummond,  is revived forty years after her first appearance in  A Charitable End. It was my first novel – so perhaps it no longer counts as a stand-alone."