Tags
14 dozen bottles of vintage champagne, Dancers in Mourning, English countryside, Essex, Margery Allingham, Police at the Funeral, strategy consulting, Suffolk, tax law, The Estate of the Beckoning Lady, The Tiger in the Smoke
So there’s a book I always go back to, one that I read over and over whenever I feel the need for Comfort Reading. This could be once a year or once a month, depending on how my life is going at any given time. The story never fails to amuse and reassure me, and always freaks me out just a little.
(I have other go-to Comfort Reads, notably The Master and Margarita and the Anne of Green Gables books, but I generally only read those once a year or so.)
I have established on this blog in past posts that Albert Campion and Margery Allingham are my favorites of the mystery genre, so it should come as no surprise that the book is The Estate of the Beckoning Lady, the fifteenth Allingham mystery featuring Campion. (It was also published in the U.S. as The Beckoning Lady, which is how I first read it before I bought it.)
The book was published in 1955, a few years after her most famous and most critically acclaimed book, The Tiger in the Smoke. I love Tiger too and re-read it occasionally, but since it concerns the escape from prison and hunt of a dangerous sociopathic murderer during a blinding London fog, it hardly counts as Comfort Reading.
For Beckoning Lady, Allingham pulls a 180 from Tiger and sets the mystery in the bucolic English countryside. Campion is vacationing in Pontisbright, his wife’s family’s ancestral home and the setting of a few previous Allingham mysteries, notably Sweet Danger. His old friend Uncle William Faraday (from Police at the Funeral and Dancers in Mourning) has died, apparently of old age, at the neighboring Beckoning Lady, the house of famous artist Minnie Cassands, where he was living since World War II. Soon after his death, another corpse appears near the Beckoning Lady – but this one has hardly died of old age, as he has “a tremendous hole in his head.”
The dead man is revealed as Leonard Ohman, a tax-collector, who made life miserable for Minnie and her retinue because of some unfortunate financial decisions taken by Minnie’s husband Tonker several years earlier. (This may be the first – and only? – mystery to involve a strange loophole in British tax law.) But did Minnie or Tonker kill him? Or one of the motley group who work for her or live on her property? And if they didn’t, who did? And what, if anything, does he have to do with Uncle William’s death?
Campion receives a mysterious armful of greenery that, in the language of flowers, says “danger…mourning…a deadly foe is here.” What does it mean, and to which death does it refer? And who sent it? He and DDCI Charlie Luke (who also appeared in several previous novels, including Tiger, and who is vacationing with Campion) must unravel all the puzzles.
In the meantime, Minnie and her household are preparing for a midsummer party they give every year, a huge and complicated affair that is partly for Minnie and Tonker’s respective business associates, and partly for close friends and family. This party is a huge amount of work for all involved, since instead of hiring caterers or getting in staff, “Minnie seems to do it all with one old lady and a pack of kids.” The party, which features Minnie’s paintings, a multi-millionaire, fourteen dozen bottles of vintage champagne, a set of beauty masks, a donkey run amok, clowns dressed as fishmongers, and another dead body, provides the climax to the story in which all is revealed.
So…this looks less-than-compelling (and possibly very strange) summarized on paper like this. But Allingham perfectly captures the magic of English country life and the lovable (and not-so-lovable) eccentricities of the characters who live there. You are transported back to a quieter, slower time and place that nonetheless must weather intrusions of the freneticism, neuroses and bureaucracies of 20th-century (and 21st-century) life. The central mystery is compelling and original, but also not really that central, as it appears in the midst of daily life that must go on, no matter how many tax collectors are found dead in ditches.
The writing, as always, is first-rate and fully indicative of Allingham’s creativity, plot mastery and expertise in ways of village life around the counties of Essex and Suffolk, northeast of London. (Allingham lived in Essex for forty years until her death in 1966, and reportedly preferred it to London. Her husband, Philip Youngman Carter, spent more time in London. In fact, many have found parallels between Minnie and Tonker in Beckoning Lady and Allingham and Carter.)
Another compelling plot point is the fact that Minnie’s husband Tonker is basically a consultant before consultants were really a profession. He and his partner Wally are “ideas men” who come up with interesting concepts for richer business partners, including flavored margarine, a use for 10,000 square yards of excess sheet plastic, and the aforementioned beauty masks. No one in the village really understands what he does, and as a strategy consultant constantly trying to explain my job to people, I can sympathize.
Mostly, I think I enjoy the book because at trying and difficult times in my life, it’s nice to think of hanging out in the English countryside with the Campions and their friends and forgetting all the stresses of job, school, house, bills, etc. It all seems lovely and idyllic…even with a body lying under the stile a half-mile away.