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More Work for the Undertaker

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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.

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."

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"!

American readers of the 21st century may find this 1949 mystery based in London to be just a little "abstruse." It takes quite a bit more effort to read than novels we find on today's best seller list, partly because of the linguistic differences and partly, probably, because of the setting and the time. Also, this is the first Allingham book I have read, so the characters were all new to me.

That said, I found the book worthwhile, with respect to learning new things, about London, about the way people spoke in that day and age and in that locale, and about their customs (still driving a horse-drawn hearse, for example), customs which seem pretty unusual today. The book is set in post-World War II years, so it's about concurrent with the publication date.

If you like literary references, you'll find a few here. The character action is muted, compared to today's novels, and only really picks up at the end, when there's a short rise to the denouement and a quick rush to the end. Instead of performing many actions, the characters do a lot of talking, and that's when you get your lesson in Briticisms and cockney accents.

For a book written in 1949, this one holds up relatively well, even for readers like me, used to reading contemporary crime fiction (as opposed to mysteries). Diximus.

Victorian London survives, not only in Diagon Alley, but also on Apron Street where the decaying Palinode clan reigns supreme. Campion and Lugg go undercover to solve the mystery of the disappearing and reappearing coffin, as a poisoner runs amuck and strong men turn pale upon hearing the phrase `going up Apron Street.'

Allingham's serial detective is about to be shipped off to govern a Royal colony as this novel begins, but he is lured back to his old job by the Chief of Scotland Yard, Stanislaus Oates, after a walk in one of London's smaller parks, and an introduction to one of the eccentric Palinode clan.

If you're fond of offbeat characters, this book is full of them, almost to the point of Cockney overload (and you thought Lugg talked funny): Jas Bowels and son, a team of shifty undertakers who seem to do most of their work at night; a pharmacist (chemist) who seems to be purveying poison along with doses of `Old Ma Appleyard's Dynamite Cough Cure and Intestine Controller;' and we also get our first glimpse of Divisional Detective Inspector, Charlie Luke who goes on to co-star in several of the later Campion mysteries. He immediately dominates any scene he appears in, like a Cockney combo of Arnold Schwarzenegger and the cast of Saturday Night Live. I like everything about D.D.I. Luke, except for the author's description of his eyes as `diamond-shaped.' What the heck does that mean?

Everybody's universal uncle and deputy adventurer (this is how Campion describes himself) gets more and more involved with the Palinodes' love affairs, their awful concoctions brewed from weeds, and internal bickerings over money. Meanwhile a mysterious coffin shuttles up and down Apron Street, an enterprising relative slips Lugg a Mickey Finn, and various characters are bashed over the head or drink poison. It's a very complicated plot, and (I think) one of Allingham's most Dickensian mysteries.

Here is a complete list of the Campion novels that Allingham wrote ("Cargo of Eagles" was completed by her husband after her death in 1966). There are also short story collections and Campion novels that were written by her husband, Youngman Carter, which I didn't include in this list.

1. The Black Dudley Murder aka The Crime at Black Dudley (1929)
2. Mystery Mile (1930)
3. Look to the Lady aka The Gyrth Chalice Mystery (1931)
4. Police at the Funeral (1931)
5. Sweet Danger aka Kingdom of Death aka The Fear Sign (1933)
6. Death of a Ghost (1934)
7. Flowers for the Judge (1936)
8. The Case of the Late Pig (1937)
9. Dancers in Mourning aka Who Killed Chloe? (1937)
10. The Fashion in Shrouds (1938)
11. Traitor's Purse aka The Sabotage Murder Mystery (1941)
12. Pearls before Swine (1945)
13. More Work for the Undertaker (1948)
14. The Tiger in the Smoke (1952)
15. Estate of the Beckoning Lady (1955)
16. Tether's End (1958)
17. The China Governess (1963)
18. The Mind Readers (1965)
19. Cargo of Eagles (1968)

I'm reading Allingham's Campion series in order, and this was next on my list - interesting, but I had a hard time getting into it. I think it was because of the Palinode family, around whom the mystery (such as it is) evolves. I kept getting the impression I was supposed to find them charming and whimsical, but I just found them rather pathetic and obnoxious (made it hard to be sympathetic to them as characters, needless to say).

Also, the previous two installments of the series ("Traitor's Purse" and "Pearls Before Swine") had rather heroic, James Bondesque plots with the monolithic menace of World War II overshadowing the action, and it felt as if Campion's action (or failure to act in time) would lead to some horrific, unspeakable event. Here, Allingham takes us to Apron Street, a tucked away corner of dreary post-war London. Mysterious deaths can't be explained away by Scotland Yard, so Campion and a very welcome Lugg are recruited to move into a boarding house and infiltrate the locals. Colorful characters abound, and Allingham's ability to make you feel a sense of place is truly remarkable, and one of the main reasons I read and collect her mysteries. My favorite scenes in any of her books are inevitably those between Campion and his former cat burgler cum butler/valet/mentor Lugg; having said that, I just couldn't sink my teeth into this one! Other reviews I've read have pointed out the rather esoteric conversation of the Palinodes as the reason some readers might be put off; I didn't have a problem comprehending them and their crumbling sense of entitlement and class-consciousness, I just didn't find them very engaging characters.

Like a fine wine. I'm almost sorry I that I'm not reading this for the first time. If you like a mystery brimming with interesting characters and you don't need lots of gore and non-stop action you can't beat Allingham's Campion.