Mr. Campion's Abdication

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.

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.)

September 4, 2017
“There’s no such thing as the Abdication Treasure, so there’s nothing to find and Campion had better make sure he doesn’t find it!” That cryptic warning, conveyed to Albert Campion through a close friend, drives the plot of Ripley’s enjoyable third novel featuring Margery Allingham’s gentleman sleuth (after 2016’s Mr. Campion’s Fault). In 1970, the production of a dramatized documentary about the abdication of Edward VIII is a family affair: Albert’s son, Rupert, and his daughter-in-law, Perdita, have been cast as Edward and Wallis Simpson, and he himself is serving as the film’s technical adviser. The movie is being shot at Heronhoe Hall, the Suffolk manor house where Edward and Mrs. Simpson held weekend trysts in 1936. Legend has it that, after marrying Mrs. Simpson in 1937, Edward sent an expensive present to the then-owner of Heronhoe. A representative of the crown is worried that Albert is using the movie as pretext to look for this item, but in fact someone else is after the treasure. Ripley makes the most of a clever mystery plot that’s not centered on a murder.

September 1, 2017
Margery Allingham's imperishable Albert Campion, now officially the last survivor of detection's golden age, looks back from 1970 to the surprisingly multilayered intrigue surrounding the Duke of Windsor's visit to a Suffolk archaeological dig shortly before he gave up the throne for the woman he loved.Although it was never to rival Sutton Hoo, it seemed for a time that the Heronhoe boat excavation would put Sweethearting Mound on archaeologists' maps, and in 1935, the future King Edward VIII came to Heronhoe with Wallis Simpson to take a look and be photographed. Their visit proved to be the highlight of the excavation, which turned up nothing much else. Even so, rumors of an Abdication Treasure the grateful Duke later sent the village persist. Now Italian TV documentary filmmaker Daniela Petraglia has swept in to re-create the visit; she's attracted Mr. Campion as her producer and financial backer; and, in a perhaps related development, she's cast his son and daughter-in-law, Rupert and Perdita, as the Duke and Mrs. Simpson. Admonished by an amusingly inappropriate emissary from the royal family to stay far away from any search for any possible treasure, Campion finds himself digging for something quite different: the truth about local journalist Samuel Salt's failure to file any stories about the royal visit, a mystery that turns out to be linked to the unsolved murder of au pair Seraphina Vezzali on a London street soon after she was implicated in a series of home robberies in 1955--a death that's long weighed on Mr. Campion's conscience. Ripley sets Allingham's hero a more substantial mystery than in Mr. Campion's Guilt (2016), and the evocations of everything from 1930s manners to an American teenager in 1970 are spot-on. Fans, however, are most likely to be drawn by the nonstop blather, which has a marvelous time-capsule freshness.

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