More Work for the Undertaker: #13 Albert Campion [Paperback]

Margery Allingham (Author)

Book Description

Series: Albert Campion | Publication Date: January 16, 2010

Apron Lane is a little bit of Dickensian London that still appears to be flourishing in the brave new post-War world. Urchins abound, and a quasi-feudal order is maintained by the eccentric Palinode family, once the squires of Apron Street and still expecting a certain forelock-tugging deference, even as their fortunes have evaporated. The Apron might be nothing more than an amusing anachronism if its Dickensian aspect did not include a distinctly Bill Sykes-style of omnipresent threat. With the police prototypically baffled, Campion takes up local lodgings in an effort to identify the source of the violence.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A top-notch mystery, full of keen characterization, humor, old English atmosphere, a charmingly decadent family and a few sudden deaths” — New York Times

About the Author

Margaret Allingham was a prolific writer who sold her first story at age eight and published her first novel before turning 20. Allingham went on to become one of the pre-eminent writers who helped bring the detective story to maturity in the 1920s and 1930s.

Product Details

• Paperback: 270 pages
• Publisher: Felony & Mayhem (January 16, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 193460948X
• ISBN-13: 978-1934609484
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #306,843 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Going Up Apron Street, May 18, 2001

By 

Marc Ruby™ "The Noh Hare™" (Warren, MI USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: More Work for the Undertaker (Hardcover)

The Palinode clan defies description. They are extraordinarily bright and eccentric, there are a fair number of them (siblings Evadne, Lawrence and Miss Jessica, plus niece Clytie) and they are extremely poor. They live in the old Palinode home as tenants of Renee Roper, its new owner and an old pal of Campion's. And, for no apparent reason, someone seems to be trying to kill them off. Campion, to the rescue as always, moves into Renee's boarding house, while Lugg, his factotum, moves in with Jas Bowels the undertaker down the road.

Subplots abound. The police suspect something is rotten in Apron Street, but aren't sure what. A coffin belonging to Bowels and his son keeps appearing and disappearing, a pharmacist dies unexpectedly and Clytie's boyfriend takes a hard bash on the noggin. Confusion is endemic and the Palinodes sit at the center of the storm calmly writing crossword puzzles and cooking recipes from a book entitled "How to Live on One-and Six."

Even though murder is a grim subject, Margery Allingham once again manages to turn it into a perfect comedy of manners. "More Work for the Undertaker" will have you snickering as the antics of the Bowels and struggling to understand Palinode quips. Nowadays there is altogether too much noir fiction. It's a great relief to settle down with one of Allingham's lighter novels and return to a London as far away as Alice's Wonderland.

A special treat in this novel is the first appearance of Charlie Luke, a Divisional Detective Inspector, as Campion's partner in detection. Now that Stanislaus Oates has become old, important, and a bit stuffy, Allingham seizes the moment to introduce Luke. His bluff and animated personality is a perfect contrast with Campion's. He will go on to be a regular in Allingham's stories from now on, taking his place with Lugg and Amanda.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More Work for the Undertaker, December 5, 2001

By 

hacklehorn - See all my reviews

This review is from: More Work for the Undertaker (Hardcover)

More Work for the Undertaker (Margery Allingham, 1949) is, with The Case of the Late Pig, with which it shares certain themes, one of Allingham's most bizarre books-a story ingenious and unusual, if somewhat cluttered-"a fascinating case ... one of the classics of its kind".

The story takes place in Apron St., "a strange decayed sort of neighbourhood", Dickensian London-at once entertaining and disquieting, due to Allingham's unique gift for making place as vivid as character, the atmosphere one of frozen time, unchanged since the Victorian era, London described as a series of villages in which the Palinodes act as squires-although, this being Margery Allingham, character is equally vivid, characters "[taking] shape like a portrait under a pencil", the reader, like Albert Campion, "impressed by the graphic quality of ... every movement ... all done by fleeting lights and shadows"-both feel "invigorated, as if life was coming back to a long-numbed corner of the mind."

The most vivid characters in the book are at the centre: the eccentric Palinode family, "queer brainy people, all boarding privately in what was once their own home. They're not easy people to get at from a police point of view, and now there's a poisoner loose among `em." Allingham sketches in the strange culture of the Palinode family as effortlessly as she did the family in Police at the Funeral. The eccentricity of the Palinodes can be gauged by their habit of speaking in crosswords-"If the Palinode `family language' consisted of references to the classics, a good memory and a comprehensive dictionary of quotations should go a long way."

It is into this strange boarding-house inhabited by eccentrics that Mr. Campion enters, posing as the nephew of the house-owner Renee Roper, who first appeared in Dancers in Mourning. Faced with these eccentric yet impractical geniuses, Campion "felt that, intellectually speaking, he was having a conversation with someone at the other end of a circular tunnel, and was in fact standing directly back to back with her. On the other hand, of course, it was possible that he had become Alice in Wonderland." The effect is the same on the reader, who steps into a world in which the unusual is commonplace, and in which everything normal is twisted out of recognition into some new mathematical perversion, so that the reader, like Alice in Through the Looking-Glass, finds himself stepping through the door-and ending up back where he started, utterly confused-a maze, amazed. Like Lewis Carroll's classics, the book is at once humorous and disturbing, the whole approach summed up in the following dialogue:

`If you hear any thumping it's just the undertaker.'

`The ultimate reassurance, said Campion.

Humorous and hilarious-but the undercurrent of something wrong, of death, of insanity, of things not being quite right, is vividly tangible. London suburbia is transformed into something rich and strange, a world in which the sordidness of gangsterdom is contrasted with the bizarre symbolism of the means they use to escape the law--somehow involved with the shady undertaking business of Magersfontein Lugg's brother-in-law Jas. Bowels, a symbol of the unpredictability of the book's approach-"an unreliable interment hardly bore imagining". The whole culminates in a surreal chase of a coffin brake through London by police squad cars-the real world has fused with the world of the bizarre-the mad world of the Palinodes.

The solution is perhaps rather cluttered, with the villain's professional criminal activities successfully carried out on one hand, his bungling amateur murders on the other. Yet the criminal's desire to "stop the clock"-a motive corresponding to the fact that the book's Dickensian approach is "an impressive anachronism, unlikely and nearly as decorative as a coach-and-four"-is well-conveyed, suiting the impression of the character the reader has received from his description and profession-character takes the place of clues, although the clues that are there are well designed, one of glasses in particular being well-hidden yet stressing the idea of frozen time, old habits dying hard.

More Work for the Undertaker is one of Margery Allingham's best-a book which lingers in the mind, filled with unforgettable characters and scenes, and with a plot bizarre and baroque, a rich triumph of the imagination-the reader can only applause and say, "Oh, very good, very good indeed... Nicely told and very good work."

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A bit of background, August 21, 2009

By 

Tom Holt (Sidmouth, England) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: More Work for the Undertaker (Hardcover)

There is little one could add to the excellent, highly detailed reviews above. However, I will try to give the potential reader a review of the style of Margery Allingham, a writer with whom most in the States will be unfamiliar. First, Allingham is a very good technical writer, her stylistic English is excellent; economical, accurate, and timeless. Then, her characterisation is as good as Dickens, the master. One weakness may be that none of her characters seem ordinary, it's as if the world is composed of eccentrics. I just find that adds to the interest of the books. Her greatest strength is in creating an evocation of place. You feel you are there; you see London before, during, and after the Blitz in many of her greatest novels. You experience life in decaying Edwardian splendour, the London art scene, rural Suffolk before we all had cars .... The genre is mystery, not detective story, although there are puzzles to solve. I've been reading these over again since I was about 10, 50+ years, and enjoy them just as much now as then, even though I know "who dunnit". That's a measure of Allingham's skill as a writer. A unique feature of the Campion novels is the humour, which is very English - faintly ridiculous, almost cruel yet self-mocking - and used with wonderful skill to illuminate the subtlety of the characterisation. So, in More Work for the Undertaker, Csmpion's hired hand, cum butler, cum friend, cum bodyguard, cum mentor, the magnificent cockney former cat burglar, before losing "my figger", Magersfontein Lugg (named after a battle in the second Boer War!), sums up his undertaker brother-in-law, one Jas Bowels, as "Bowels by name and bowels by nature"!