Mystery Mile (#1930Club, #RIPXIV)

Mr. Albert Campion

Coups neatly executed

Nothing sordid, vulgar or plebeian

Deserving cases preferred

Police no object

That's the business card our hero hands out, and it pretty much all applies to the case related in Mystery Mile.

Judge Crowder is the target of the so-called Misfire Murders, in which four other people are murdered, presumably in attempts to kill the judge. Judge Crowder has earned the ire of the Simister gang, and has a clue as to its anonymous leader, though he's not entirely sure what he's got. He heads to England with the idea that being away from the gang's main base of operations will make him safer; but he's unwilling to hide or much change his life, and leaving New York is all he's willing to do. The novel starts when a fifth attempt on his life is made shipboard and is foiled (by accident?) by Campion. 

Since the judge won't put up with police protection, his son hires Campion to do what he can.

This is more adventure than mystery; after those first four murders that occur offstage, as it were, there are no others, though there is a kidnapping; the judge survives; the identity of Simister is only thinly hidden, I thought.

I've only read a few of the Campion stories. This is the second in which he appears, but the first where he's the major figure. Campion is famous for his non-sequiturs, his distracted conversational style. I have the feeling that gets tamed as the series goes along, but he's in full inscrutability here, babbling (or is he?) about his pet mouse's birthday in the first chapter. The world around Campion is still being built: this is the first appearance of his formerly criminal assistant, but now his butler, Magersfontein Lugg. It's also the first appearance of that useful thing, a friend at Scotland Yard, Stanislas Oates.

Anyway, very entertaining, I thought. Made me wonder why I hadn't read more Allingham.

#1930Club

It's year book club time again and this year it's 1930. This semi-annual club is hosted at Stuck in a Book and Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings; the idea is participants read books set in the given year and blog about them; it gives a fun overall picture of the year in question. Naturally I used this as an excuse to pile up books:

We've got some large, medium, and small choices there. The first volume of The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil and Holbrook Jackson's The Anatomy of Bibliomania count as large; J. B. Priestly's Angel Pavement, which looks bigger than it is, and Not Without Laughter by Langston Hughes are my mediums; and the shorties are Margery Allingham's Mystery Mile and P. G. Wodehouse's story collection Very Good, Jeeves.

The pile is aspirational, of course,... 😉and, in particular, I'm unlikely to read both the larges. I'm tempted by Musil, which was the subject of a series of great blog posts at the Bookbinder's Daughter, but it would be a reread for me. The appeal--to me--of a book titled The Anatomy of Bibliomania is not hard to figure out, and, well, I've already started it.

Also, because I feel like I should deprecate rereads at the moment, Miss Marple, Ellery Queen, Sam Spade, Charlie Chan, and Simon Templar all stayed on their shelves. But I read Enter The Saint recently enough that I do have a blog post for it.

Thanks to Simon and Kaggsy for hosting!

Which look good to you?

Leslie Charteris' Enter The Saint

Enter The Saint is a collection of three novelets that came out originally in 1930 and is actually the second Saint volume by Charteris. Still, "...at the date of the Ganning episode [the first of the novelets] the Saint had only just commenced operations, and his name had not yet come to be surrounded with aura of infallibility which it was to earn for itself later."

I call them novelets because that's what Charteris calls them in the interesting introduction to my 1971 reprint. Forty years of Saint stories, novels, movies, television shows, radio plays, comic books, and stage plays are in the middle. Charteris tells us there are things he would have done differently. Obviously he did something right...

Simon Templar, AKA The Saint, inherited enough money from somewhere never really specified, enough to live, had he wanted to, the life of a luxurious playboy. Instead he craves adventure, and he has a Robin Hood streak that compels him to use those adventures to steal from thieves and give the proceeds to charity. Less his 10% for expenses. As a Robin Hood, he's got a Maid Marian, a Will Scarlet, and a Friar Tuck on his team. He's a stylish and debonair vigilante.

"...the flippant dandy with the heart of a crusader, a fighter who laughed as he fought, the reckless, smiling swashbuckler, the inspired and beloved leader of men, the man born with the sound of trumpets in his ears."

Charteris doesn't want you in any doubt who his Saint is.

In the first of the episodes he comes across a nice young man who's unfortunately gone a bit wrong, getting himself tied in with gamblers who run a drug running ring on the side. The Saint takes care of that ending with a car chase from Central London to Edgware in a Furillac.

The second sees a fake policeman stage two kidnappings; naturally the Saint decides he, too, should have one of his gang play a policeman to confuse the crooks. The car chase this time involves a Desurio, and goes further afield, to Dartmoor. Inspector Teal of Scotland Yard is queried to discover what the game is for; the crooks are delivered to Scotland Yard, and the loot has its own trip to make. Inspector Teal is once again allowed to clean up.

The last story doesn't involve some imaginary make of car, but a yacht and a seaplane; a group of rich men and their jewelry-wearing wives are lured on the yacht in a scam that, if all went well, was going to relieve them of their jewels and money. All does not go well, unless you're counting for the Saint.

I've read a bunch, but not all, of the Saint stories, and I thought these were very good outings, quite enjoyable. The Saint's flippancy can be insufferable, but that's pretty much by design.

From the introduction:

"It is thrilling enough for a boy to skirmish with imaginary savages in a stalk through the woods. Later he will discover much quieter and deadlier monsters, while at the same time he is reaching towards the stars."

I don't know whether that's a Desurio or  Furillac or maybe just some muscle car from forty years after the date of the stories, but it is:

Golden Age. Car/Truck. My Reader's Block Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt