I’ve set myself the task for 2024 of reading and then writing about 25 pieces of London fiction I haven’t read before. This is number 15 in the haphazard series.
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Ealing-born Margery Allingham wrote a whole heap of crime and detection stories, beginning in 1929 when she was in her mid-twenties, and continuing until her death in 1966, aged 62. Though schooled in Essex and Cambridge, she returned to London in 1920 and studied drama and speech training at Regent Street Polytechnic, now part of Westminster University.
She is considered one of the four Queens of Crime from detective fiction’s golden age, the others being Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Ngaio Marsh. The Tiger in The Smoke, published in 1952, was considered by her fellow crime writer Julian Symons to be her best book.
It starts vividly, describing a taxi ride past an unspecified London park (probably Hyde) amid a filthy fog “like a saffron blanket coated in ice water” and traffic moving “at an irritable crawl”. The cab’s passengers are war widow Meg Elginbrodde, “Queen Nefertiti in a Dior ensemble”, and her rugged businessman fiancee, Geoffrey Levett.
Soon, Meg is keeping an appointment with a couple of sleuths, including Allingham’s recurring hero Albert Campion, at an unspecified railway station – a mention of West Country locomotives indicates Paddington – where a man who has been impersonating her late husband all over town makes a fleeting appearance and soon after is found dead.
The plot then unfolds in extraordinary stages, involving a dauntless, ageing canon, a blackmailing lady loan shark, a musical band of petty but greedy villains and murderous super crook, Jack Havoc. Much hinges on what Geoffrey overhears while hogtied in a basement, before everyone tears off to Brittany in search of buried treasure.
Throughout, Allingham conveys the capital’s toxic peasoupers of the era – routine, rank miasmas that literally limited visibility to a few yards. A particularly dense one thickens the atmosphere around a murder scene at the dark end of her fictitious Crumb Street:
“It was no night for strolling and there were few people about, but the inevitable group of the under-entertained were lounging round a dark entrance beside the Four Feathers public house. The tavern was of the lesser gin-palace type. It leered at them through the mist, flaunting off-handedly a drab gaiety of tile and trademark, while along the brass rail which bordered the frosted glass diapering of the saloon window, a row of half-heads, grotesquely bisected, were turned to peer at them curiously as they swept by.”
The lead detective has a yellow silk sock tied over his torch to make its beam more penetrating, “but even so progress was difficult”. The Great Smog of London occurred in the December of the year the novel was published, making it perfectly prescient. The first Clean Air Act came into force four years later.
There are some other delicious descriptions: a loquacious landlady is described as having “a gentle voice and that kind of London accent which is like the waters of the Thames at the Pool, by no means unpleasant but the least bit thick”. A cockney chauffeur is more of a cartoon:
“‘Oh for gord’s sake,’ exploded Mr Lugg, a misty mountain in the muffled light from the dashboard. ‘Drivin’ this and listenin’ to you, it’s like being up to me eyes in the creek. What ‘ad the perisher wrote down?'”
The Tiger in the Smoke is dazzling in parts, implausible in others and, by modern standards, in some places quite slow. Still, I recommend you buy one. You’re definitely not having mine.
John Vane is a pen name used by Dave Hill, editor and publisher of On London. Buy John Vane’s London novel Frightgeist: A Tall Tale of Fearful Times here, here or here. Subscribe to his Substack too.