Mr. Campion's Farewell

by Mike Ripley

Overview

The Golden Age of British Detective Fiction

The idyllic English village of Lindsay Carfax isn’t run by the parish council, the rating authority, the sanitary inspector nor the local cops as you might suppose. The real bosses are the Carders – something to do with wool, four hundred years back. They wound stuff on cards, I suppose. But these boys are very fly customers – they’re right on the ball. Boiled down, it comes to this; they’re a syndicate who run this place – which makes a packet – with their own rules. One way and another they probably own most of it.” Thus ruminated Superintendent Charles Luke to Albert Campion who was contemplating visiting his wayward artistic niece in Carfax. And when a missing schoolteacher reappeared after nine days, and Campion’s car was “inadvertently” damaged, not to mention Campion himself, then all the signs were that not all was what it seemed. Campion himself plays the central role in this quintessentially British mystery, but there are appearances too from all of Margery Allingham’s regular characters, from Luke to Campion’s former manservant Lugg, to his wife Lady Amanda Fitton and others. The dialogue is sharp and witty, the observation keen, and the climax is thrilling and eerily atmospheric.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781847515087
Publisher:	Severn House Publishers
Publication date:	11/01/2014
Series:	Albert Campion Mysteries
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Mike Ripley is the two-time winner of the Crime Writers’ Last Laugh award, and the author of several thrillers and historical novels. He writes a hugely respected monthly review column for Shots Magazine entitled getting Away with Murder. Philip Youngman Carter was Margery Allingham’s artist husband and a novelist in his own right.

Interviews

With the co-operation of the Margery Allingham Society, I have completed the untitled third novel by Pip Youngman Carter, Margery’s widower, left unfinished on his death in 1969. On Margery’s death in 1966, Youngman Carter completed her novel Cargo of Eagles (published 1968) and two further Campion books: Mr Campion’s Farthing and Mr Campion’s Falcon. He was at work on a third, which would have been the twenty-second Campion novel, when he died in November 1969.

Pip’s fragment of manuscript, which contained revisions and minor corrections but no plot outline, character synopsis or plan, was bequeathed to Margery Allingham’s sister Joyce; and upon her death in 2001, the manuscript was left to officials of the Margery Allingham Society (MAS). In 2010, as a guest speaker at the Society’s annual convention, I first learned of Youngman Carter’s unfinished novel, despite being an avid Allingham fan for more than forty years and having lived within ten miles of Pip and Margery’s home in Tolleshunt d’Arcy in Essex for more than twenty.

In 2012 Barry Pike, Chairman of the Margery Allingham Society, took up my rash offer to complete Pip’s manuscript as an affectionate conclusion to the adventures of Albert Campion, one of the brightest stars in the rich firmament of British crime writing. But Severn House is so enthusiastic that they have commissioned a further title Mr Campion’s Fox for 2015. I must also thank Julia Jones, Margery Allingham’s biographer, and novelist Andrew Taylor for their encouragement after reading early drafts.

Editorial Reviews

Ripley agreed to use the fragment to write a new Campion story. He’s produced a whimsical, delightful, witty, entertaining book that’s part Jeeves and Wooster, part Laurel and Hardy, and part Miss Marple. Charming and full of surprises

Booklist

Ripley agreed to use the fragment to write a new Campion story. He’s produced a whimsical, delightful, witty, entertaining book that’s part Jeeves and Wooster, part Laurel and Hardy, and part Miss Marple. Charming and full of surprises

Booklist

"England's funniest crime writer" Times

“Charming and full of surprises” Booklist

From the Publisher

2014-06-17
In his 22nd adventure, a gentleman detective takes on local politics and characters as eccentric as he is.When Albert Campion visits the picturesque East Anglian town of Lindsay Carfax, it’s purportedly to visit Eliza Jane Fitton, his wife’s niece. His ulterior motive, however, is to nose around the town at the request of his friend, CID Superintendent Charles Luke. The town’s mysterious governing body, the Carders, dates back to the late Middle Ages and pays homage to Lindsay Carfax’s heyday as a prosperous wool-trading center. Now it’s the tourists who get fleeced, as Campion discovers when he visits the antiques store that sells his niece’s paint-to-order landscapes and the shop of an 18th-century apothecary and his weather-forecasting apparatus, the Humble Box. But the quaint half-timbered buildings belie a more modern tragedy: Two archaeology students died from a drug overdose the year before during an influx of hippies. More recently, a schoolteacher became the latest Nine Days’ Wonder when he disappeared and reappeared the worse for wear, and Eliza Jane was hurt by a booby trap meant for her artist boyfriend. A visit to Campion’s Cambridge college further educates him about the wool business and the practice of owling, or sheep smuggling. But his real focus is on secret underground passages that everyone knows about and the secret Carders whose identities are equally open knowledge. Underneath what his wife calls an Idiot-in-Search-of-a-Village expression, Campion is shrewd enough to discover the truth in Ripley's completion of a fragment left behind by Campion creator Margery Allingham’s husband, who wrote several Campion adventures in her name after she died.Ripley (Angels Unaware, 2008, etc.) is almost too successful in fulfilling the bespectacled detective’s ploy of making himself an ineffectual nonentity. Only toward the end of this meandering, fitfully amusing, resolutely twee story does Campion become more than a sad echo of an earlier age.

Kirkus Reviews