Starred review from May 5, 2014
Ripley (The Legend of Hereward) does an excellent job of expanding a story fragment that Allingham’s husband, Pip Youngman Carter, began in 1969. Ripley sets his Albert Campion novel in that same year, with an older detective traveling to the English village of Lindsay Carfax, the scene of a number of unusual occurrences. Most recently, schoolmaster Lemmy Walker disappeared for nine days; upon his return, he refused to discuss his whereabouts. His reticence may be connected with the Carders, the shadowy organization that runs the community; 400 years earlier, the Carders had “something to do with wool.” The danger soon becomes personal for Campion. His artist niece, Eliza Jean Fitton, almost breaks her neck after someone sets a trap on a staircase. Ripley is especially good at recreating the humorous wordplay of the originals (Campion refers to a speaker as suffering from “loose vowels”), and does so in service of a well-crafted plot that plausibly places the detective, who debuted in 1929, in a more contemporary setting. Allingham fans will welcome the news that Severn has commissioned a follow-up, and newcomers will be inspired to seek out her work.
July 1, 2014
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.
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May 1, 2014
After Margery Allingham's death, in 1966, fans feared her beloved Albert Campion series would die with her. Then her husband stepped in and wrote three further novels in her name. When he died, in 1969, he left behind a fragment of a new novel, but it was only in 2012 that 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. Albert is asked by Scotland Yard to visit the village of Lindsay Carfax, where there have been strange goings-on for years, most recently the disappearance of a local schoolteacher, who reappears nine days later, clearly having suffered both mental and physical trauma. Since Albert's niece lives in Lindsay Carfax, he has a good excuse for visiting and launching an undercover investigation. Undeterred by threats to his person and even physical violence, Albert exposes Lindsay Carfax's dark secrets in a story that stretches from the sleepy village all the way to the French Riviera. Charming and full of surprises.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)