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A review by siria
The Crime at Black Dudley by Margery Allingham
1.0
It's perhaps a bit unfair to chastise a book that's almost a hundred years old for being dated, especially when Margery Allingham was one of the coterie of writers in the Twenties and Thirties who helped to establish many of the conventions of detective/murder mystery fiction that seem familiar and even clichéd to us now. (Although The Crime at Black Dudley is only sort of incidentally an English Country House Murder Mystery, and more Bright Young Things Do Scooby Doo, with the Pesky Kids foiling the melodramatic schemes of an international crime ring run by men who run the gamut of stereotypes from xenophobic to plain old anti-Semitic.)
But Allingham's characters often act and think in ways that make me struggle to imagine how even her contemporaries could have thought them psychologically convincing: the emotional equivalent of a kiss in a Thirties Hays Code movie, where the couple mash their lips together without moving for 2.9 seconds in a vague facsimile of passion. The gender politics here are awful.
And even then I might have given this two stars—tosh, but of the readable-on-an-airline variety—if not for the ending, which breaks the cardinal rule of this kind of book. In other words, while it may be possible for the reader to work out whodunit, that's only through using the process of elimination—not because of any actual clues given, while all the information needed to understand whydunit is not given until the last chapter.
That, friends, is a cheat—and that, combined with the fact that the whydunit is what I will tactfully call bonkers bananas, is why I have no plans to pick up another Margery Allingham novel.
But Allingham's characters often act and think in ways that make me struggle to imagine how even her contemporaries could have thought them psychologically convincing: the emotional equivalent of a kiss in a Thirties Hays Code movie, where the couple mash their lips together without moving for 2.9 seconds in a vague facsimile of passion. The gender politics here are awful.
And even then I might have given this two stars—tosh, but of the readable-on-an-airline variety—if not for the ending, which breaks the cardinal rule of this kind of book. In other words, while it may be possible for the reader to work out whodunit, that's only through using the process of elimination—not because of any actual clues given, while all the information needed to understand whydunit is not given until the last chapter.
That, friends, is a cheat—and that, combined with the fact that the whydunit is what I will tactfully call bonkers bananas, is why I have no plans to pick up another Margery Allingham novel.