Published in 1955, this is by Margery Allingham.

And I'm all out of order again... The Beckoning Lady is the 15th Albert Campion mystery. I've read the 4th (Police at the Funeral), the 12th (Coroner's Pidgin), and the 13th (More Work for the Undertaker), and was supposed to be going back to fill in some of the earlier ones. But here we are...

And why? Well, I wanted something not too demanding, for travel purposes. And I'd been reminded of Allingham by Marian Keyes, because Lola, in This Charming Man, is entertained by the Campion novels while she's away recovering from a broken heart.

The story is set in the Sussex village of Pontisbright; it's midsummer; and the weather (as in so many of the books I've read lately) reflects our current heatwave. It begins: "It was no time for dying. The summer had arrived in glory, trailing fathomless skies and green and gold and particolour as fresh as sunrise, yet death was about, twice."

My audio-version was really well narrated by David Thorpe, who has an astonishing range of voices and accents at his command. Campion is aristocratically high-pitched, droppin' his g's right and left; Detective Chief Inspector Charles Luke (recovering from injury in the village where mayhem is about to be unleashed) is determinedly cockney; the "ridiculous drawl" of Hon. Victoria Prunella Editha Scroop-Dory (aka Prune) becomes positively comatose in Thorpe's hands; and Minnie Cassands, the artist at the centre of the plot (and the wife of mad inventor Tonker), is invigoratingly baritone. It's a thoroughly enjoyable listen.



***

So... Uncle William has died. Albert Campion suspects he had a helping hand, and starts to do some investigatin'. And now there's another body: A former Inland Revenue man, hit over the head with a heavy object. We're quickly learning to boo a suite of off-stage bad guys, fronted by the egregiously rude Sidney Simon Smith. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that their goal is to swindle Minnie out of her property (the fine house known as The Beckoning Lady, about which, says Campion's wife, a local, people tend to "go silly"). And before we're finished there's a third body, floating gracefully down a country stream...

It's a wild and wacky story, peopled by utterly byzantine characters. Aside from the ones I've already mentioned, we have "Old Harry", a magus-like country figure who always seems to know way more than he lets on, but whose gift for bamboozling people leaves you in constant doubt as to what he just "knows", and what he has himself engineered; and we have Magersfontein Lugg, Campion's veteran assistant, who is his usual bizarre self.

The beginning is managed very creepily. The ex-tax man (whose identity we don't yet know) is killed, but his body topples into the undergrowth under the bridge. The days pass. The body is still concealed to all except one person, and that person is not saying anything. "On the eighth day the inevitable occurred and a large and sagacious dog came into the field..."


Not Sussex, but Somerset. But I think this could well be how The Beckoning Lady looked...

***

We're in the 1950s. Often the (slightly too large) cast of characters seems rooted in a more genteel and elegant age, but post-war economics have kicked in; tax is a terrible problem; and Tonker reports a solicitor presciently announcing that "ours was going to be the generation which would die of want and neglect because the young would be too over-worked to look after us, and no one would have any money anyway". At one point, Campion comments gloomily: "I've lived through the Jazz Age, the Age of Appeasement, the Battle Age. Now it's the Age of the Official."

Set against this austere background, Tonker's midsummer party seems almost Shakespearean. I absolutely agree with Kate MacDonald (whose review is by far the best): "The Beckoning Lady is also a fantasy, a dream of meadows and hayfields in an English summer... [It] has a powerful atmosphere of country magic and mischief... The children are like Titania's fairies at the party, flitting about with bottles and plates. When the clowns arrive, 'the garden-party quality of the gathering turned into something wilder. The setting sun shone brighter, the wind got up.'... This is a dreamlike novel, and a deeply satisfying one. Reading it will make you want to have a party for all your friends at midsummer."

Totally...