Jackdaw Library - 1937
Margery Allingham was regarded as one of the Big Four lady detective novelists between the Wars. In fact, the first Jarrolds 'Jackdaw' published in October 1936, was her Look to the Lady. It is one of the four (out of a total of 22) Jackdaws I have still to track down. The other one, republished as the penultimate novel in the paperback series, was The White Cottage Mystery (No. 21). I have yet to read it.
There is a house party at the remote Black Dudley mansion, where there are several hidden rooms and secret passages. Owned by Wyatt Petrie, a young academic, the house is lived in by his uncle by marriage, Colonel Coombe, a sickly man who wears a face mask to cover (apparently) unsightly scarring. Most of the guests are friends of Petrie (a weakness of the book, or is it this reader?, is there are too many names to remember). Included are the ginger-headed hero, George Abbershaw, pathologist and occasional consultant to Scotland Yard, and the flame-haired Meggie, whom Abbershaw obviously desires. It is also the first outing for Albert Campion, at that stage supposedly a parody of Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey. He comes across as an indolent fop. Notwithstanding this, the author's American publisher told Allingham subsequently to concentrate on him; out went Abbershaw, originally planned by Allingham to be the main protagonist, and in came Campion for a further 17 novels and over 20 short stories. I found Campion immensely irritating - smug, trying to be humorous all the time and a weed. I can't stand wet men! Presumably his character improved over the next few dozen stories. I certainly hope so.
There are also a shady group: the Colonel's doctor, White Whitby, a shifty Englishman called Gideon and a taciturn foreigner named Benjamin Dawlish (actually a German master criminal called Eberhard Von Faber - one of the deadliest men in Europe). After the inaugural Dinner, the guests notice a sinister dagger hanging above the fireplace. Petrie describes the family tradition of the dagger being passed from hand to hand in the dark. Everyone is keen to play; the servants are dismissed; the lights turned out; the ritual starts. When the lights come back on, they all hear that the Colonel has been taken to bed due to illness. In fact, he has died. Abbershaw is asked to sign a form for cremation, but sees that Dr. Whitby's assessment that Coombe died of heart failure is nonsense. He had been murdered. Moreover the face behind the mask was normal (it is never explained why this was important). Abbershaw is made to sign.
Then the plotting descends into a maelstrom of increasingly unlikely happenings. These include vital documents being found and burnt; Von Faber forbidding anyone to leave the house until such documents are returned to him; Campion being roughly interrogated; Abbershaw and Meggie being locked up together; and a hymn-singing eccentric old woman locked up in the next room. The gang of ruffians, failing to find the vital documents, decide to leave but aim to set fire to the house with all the guests inside. Just in time, the local Hunt rides up and saves the day. The Last Chapter finds Abbershaw visiting Petrie in his London Queen Anne home, where he gets the latter to confess he was the murderer of Coombe and that the dagger story was an anachronistic hoax.
I finished the novel in a mild state of disappointment. It was the first Allingham book I have read and I was not overly impressed. It felt very much like an author still learning how to plot, as too often the story seemed rather bizarre and unlikely. The characters, apart from perhaps Abbershaw, were very thinly drawn and one or two bordered on mere caricature. I think the early Ian Carmichael could have played Campion - i.e. a silly ass.
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