Dancers in Mourning (1937)
My review:
“Theatrical people aren’t like ordinary people, sir… They’re theatrical. Things mean more to them than they would to you or me—little things do… Being in the theatre is like living in a little tiny village where everybody’s looking at everybody else and wondering what they’re going to be up to next.”
Margery Allingham’s strengths were her characterisation, her imagination and her style. Here she creates a theatrical world of dancers, some in passionate and self-destructive love affairs, others epicene, but all are real—all are vivid. And no less vivid is Mr. Campion, whose emotions suffer due to his love for the wife of the man he suspects of having committed three particularly brutal murders. The second of these murders, an exploding bicycle in a railway station, is shocking and sensational without being in any way improbable. It is not only Campion who suffers: it is the suspects themselves, all stressed, all worrying, all hoping for an end to the nightmare. And it is because we care for them as people that we turn the pages so quickly to a most ingenious solution.