Uncommon Mysteries is the heading I’m using for brief notes I’ve made about mysteries I found odd, or especially good, or memorable in some other way. Some of these notes were broadcast as fillers on a public radio station, WKMS, in Murray, Kentucky, a decade ago. Others are new.
Jack Havoc is the seemingly unstoppable villain, the tiger in the smoke, which is London’s fog. Detective Albert Campion discovers that Havoc, an escaped murderer, is the one terrorizing Campion’s cousin Meg with suggestions that her husband, supposedly killed on D-Day, is not really dead. After various adventures and near captures of Havoc, we discover his real identity as well as the wartime story of Meg’s dead husband, but Havoc escapes again at the end. Campion’s wife is Amanda Fitton, and his valet, the reformed burglar Magersfontein Lugg.
The Tiger in the Smoke, by the way, is J. K. Rowling’s favorite crime novel.
In The Case of the Late Pig, the only Campion book narrated in the first person by the detective himself, R. I. Peters refuses to rest in peace. Campion knew the dead man at school as the notorious bully “Pig” Peters; at his funeral in rural Suffolk, in East Anglia, to which Campion has been summoned by an anonymous cryptic note, Campion meets the doctor who says he nursed Peters in his last illness, the woman we later learn was the fiancée of the man she calls “Roly”—as in roly-poly—Peters, another old schoolmate named Whippet, and a fourth person who turns out to be Peters’s uncle, and who becomes the second murder victim.
A few months later an old flame of Campion’s summons him again to East Anglia, and it turns outs that Pig Peters had died again, this time calling himself Harris, and this time the victim of an obvious murder. The doctor says it’s Pig’s brother. The solicitor says it might be. Whippet turns out to be working for Peters’s life insurance company as well as the author of the anonymous letters Campion’s been getting. And Lugg almost turns up dead before Campion can catch the murderer, whom we just might have suspected from our first meeting with him.
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