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A review by jodonjo
Death of a Ghost by Margery Allingham
4.0
I thought this book was delightful. The different characters really come alive as you're drawn into this interwar art-set world. Dear old Belle, keeping court in Little Venice; the bombastic and cattish Max Fustian striding around; Linda scowling and incandescent; and the wonderfully bizarre collection of ageing models.
As a detective, Campion does very little detecting, he has a few clever insights but spends the whole novel on the backfoot. The mystery is more in uncovering the whys, than the hows or whos. For me this made a rather neat contrast with Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. Christie is famous for the whodunnit, culminating in a denouement where the reader might pause and try to work out if they've figured it out themselves. The books are puzzles of detection, and the characters and settings aren't as strongly drawn as Allingham manages here. I've only read Unnatural Death by Sayers, and in that Wimsey does a good deal more detecting (often via proxies as he's too famous to make an appearance himself), but you basically know who committed the crime and more-or-less why, the mystery is in how it was done and how the killer almost gets away with it. In Death of a Ghost, the hunting for clues mostly happens off-page by the police, Campion's role is an observer of a social world.
The ending has a delightful sequence at a party and then on a drunken night wandering, but the actual resolution was more of the same passivity. So as a detective story, it's clearly inadequate. And yet! I really did enjoy it on a scene-by-scene level.
As a detective, Campion does very little detecting, he has a few clever insights but spends the whole novel on the backfoot. The mystery is more in uncovering the whys, than the hows or whos. For me this made a rather neat contrast with Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. Christie is famous for the whodunnit, culminating in a denouement where the reader might pause and try to work out if they've figured it out themselves. The books are puzzles of detection, and the characters and settings aren't as strongly drawn as Allingham manages here. I've only read Unnatural Death by Sayers, and in that Wimsey does a good deal more detecting (often via proxies as he's too famous to make an appearance himself), but you basically know who committed the crime and more-or-less why, the mystery is in how it was done and how the killer almost gets away with it. In Death of a Ghost, the hunting for clues mostly happens off-page by the police, Campion's role is an observer of a social world.
The ending has a delightful sequence at a party and then on a drunken night wandering, but the actual resolution was more of the same passivity. So as a detective story, it's clearly inadequate. And yet! I really did enjoy it on a scene-by-scene level.