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.

 

An extraordinary work, one of the two or three best things she ever wrote.  Albert Campion becomes less of an ingenuous (or seemingly so) ass and completes his transformation into human being ready for the emotional and criminal complexities of The Fashion in Shrouds.  His love for the wife of Jimmy Sutane, the dancer whom he suspects of the murders of an ageing comedienne, a highly effeminate understudy and a crowd of innocent bystanders, and a Polish bomb-maker, blinds him to the real truth: the truth the reader should have suspected had he not seen everything and felt everything so keenly from Campion’s perspective, for the type of murders correspond to only one man’s psychology—Allingham’s gift for characterisation, which makes all her characters genuine people in the Dickensian manner (e.g. Chloe Pye’s ghastly sister-in-law and the inquisitive neighbour), means that her murderers are always unique individuals.

To the Bibliography.

To the Allingham Page.

To the Grandest Game in the World.

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