More Work for the
Undertaker (1948)
Note: I wrote on both this and Police at
the Funeral (1931) for the Margery Allingham Centenary
publication, Margery Allingham: 100
Years of a Great Mystery Writer, ed. Marianne van Hoeven and
Barry Pike, and full of interesting articles by people of the calibre
of Catherine Aird, Robert Barnard, Martin Edwards, H.R.F. Keating, Tony
Medawar, etc. To order a copy, click here.
My review:
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, or Peter Dickinson the Kus of Skin-Deep. 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, violent and lawless men rising from coffins, the Christ parallel intertwined with professional criminals 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.”