Book #12: The Beckoning Lady

[pyat]

Book #12 of 2008 is The Beckoning Lady, by Margery Allingham (1955).

I finished this one on Wednesday afternoon. It's one of the last of the Albert Campion stories by Margery Allingham. Campion may be best known to nerds by way to the BBC dramatizations that starred Peter Davison, AKA the Fifth Doctor.

There is a curiously lunatic and sinister tone about the dialogue and characters, and it's not just because murders are being committed. There is a bunch of strange business with pliable rubber masks. There are ridiculously enormous (and somehow unwholesome) wind instruments made of bladders and transparent plastic that disturb Campion so much he describes one as a "pornograph." The action is full of significant glances and the dialogue contains frustrating double-meanings that are never made apparent. There are sinister clowns, a giggling detective, a man with eggshell skull, a house that seems to be only the front half (like one of those hollow-backed women from Irish myth), and unexpected ice cream.

The dialogue and action is confusing and opaque for about 50 pages, and then suddenly it acquires a kind of emergent order, but one that is simply overlaid as a thin veneer over a terrifying social abyss. The reader would not be surprised if tea on the lawn is followed by canabalism in the drawing room. One expects Cthulhu to show up by page 180.

The early Campion stories were very basic murder mysteries that stood out because of Allingham's unusual strength of characterization and ability to paint a scene. They gradually acquired more depth and became progressively darker, eventually turning into novels that almost read like forgotten scripts from The Prisoner.

Edit: Also, I liked it!

Comments

[melstra.livejournal.com]

Yes, yes, but did you LIKE it??
I haven't read any Allingham, but I'm a HUGE devotee of Dorothy Sayers' Peter Wimsey books and stories. I did see some of the Campion BBC stuff years ago and liked it. Should I try all the books or just the early ones?

[pyat.livejournal.com]

I did like it!

I'd start with one of the later-early ones, like "Flowers of the Judge" or "Police at the Funeral."

[zenten.livejournal.com]

Or by my grandmother as Tristan.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Hmm?

[zenten.livejournal.com]

All Creatures Great and Small? It's what made Peter Davison famous.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Ah, of course! I was parsing your comment oddly.

[melstra.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's how I remember him best too, since I was only introduced to Dr. WHo recently. :-)

Btw, I LOVE LOVE your icon!!

[zenten.livejournal.com]

Thanks, it's a picture of my son that my mom took and photoshopped (she's a big Superman fan).

[momentrabbit.livejournal.com]

I personally regard Davidson's work on 'A Very Peculiar Practice' as fascinating, if for no other reason that it was actually set in the current day (at the time), which was a bit of a novelty for him.

And what's this about half-hollow women?

[pyat.livejournal.com]

There's a sort of fairy in various stories that is, essentially, a hollow woman with no back. Like a jelly-mold of a woman. They were of course extremely beautiful and prone to seducing respectable travellers.

[foomf.livejournal.com]

Called a "Wood-Wife" ... I don't recall anything particularly harmful about them except that they tended to be very good at only one thing, and the real wife sometimes ended up frustrated.

[doc-mystery.livejournal.com]

I may be an exception to your rule, as I've never seen the BBC dramatizations. I've read perhaps a dozen or so Campion books and I've enjoyed most of them (with the first I read, The Crime at Black Dudley being perhaps the oddest).

I can't say I've noticed this descent into weirdness as the series progresses, but then again I prefer to read series books in order, and I haven't got out of the 1930s in the books of Allingham's I have read).

::B::

[pyat.livejournal.com]

I'd be happy to lend you a couple, Brian!

[normanrafferty.livejournal.com]

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier is out. It has a Wooster & Jeeves fanfic.