Because he’s a connoisseur of hundred-year-old cognac, Albert Campion ends up as the representative of his spirits merchant at a gathering where the pitch is a machine that ages cognac; in this case, Campion manages to hand over to his friend, Superintendent Stanislaus Oates, a notorious wanted criminal, “The Widow,” in the first of a baker’s dozen of short stories featuring Allingham’s society man about town. The stories were published separately in the thirties, ending with 1939, the year the war began, which also saw the publication of the collection. Campion also has an arcane knowledge of rings where semi-precious stones’ first letters spell out the name of the person to whom they’re given. This knowledge helps net him another catch for Oates, a country-house burglar, in “The Name on the Wrapper.” Campion is able to help out an old friend and his new love and to prevent the new love’s father from falling victim to a con man, in “The Hat Trick.” A silver merchant gives Campion a hint that helps him crack burglaries that targeted old silver, in a story, “The Question Mark,” with more than even the usually high Allingham quotient of coincidence.
Allingham was notoriously coy about Campion’s background, but he is clearly an aristocrat who hobnobs with nobles and possibly even royals. From the more than two dozen novels and short story collections featuring the character, readers have gleaned that Albert Campion is a pseudonym, that he is a younger brother but probably succeeded to the title—possibly viscount—at some point. The Wikipedia article on “Albert Campion” teases all this out.
How could a reputable doctor think a man was dead and then find him hale and hearty two hours later? So Campion asks himself in “The Man in the Window.” Juliet Fyssher-Sprigge, a young friend of Campion’s, involves him and Oates, through her fiancé and his mother, in another burglary case and a frantic trip to France, in “The White Elephant.” When a French jewel dealer comes to London and promptly disappears, in “The Frenchman’s Gloves,” Campion has to figure out what is going on, with some help from Oates. Slumming and reminiscing with an old friend, Campion finds evidence of a kidnaping. He and the friend investigate; the story is “The Longer View.”
These little mysteries that have been hovering close to Campion, starting with girls he knows or old friends, finally come closer in “Safe as Houses,” featuring the formidable Great Aunt Charlotte and her moral imbecile of a son. Neither Oates nor Campion’s friend Lance Feering likes Campion’s pickpocket pal Cassy Wild, even though Cassy delivers to Oates the perpetrator of the evening’s crime, as “The Meaning of the Act” takes us into espionage and the war years. Campion’s advice to the snobbery of his friends is “Take a drink with anyone and pick your pals where you find’ em.” A safecracker devises a scheme to get government and private offices to give him information about the kinds of safes they have—he specializes in only Bream safes—by filling out what look like official government forms, in “A Matter of Form.” And in the last story, “The Danger Point,” a stolen pearl necklace becomes a means to try to extort a young woman into an unwanted marriage.
The Campion of these stories is not the Lord-Peter-Wimsey wannabee of the early novels. He is at ease in the high society world where many of his friends and family are to be found, and equally at ease with the Cassy Wilds of the underworld and the ordinary police people of Superintendent Oates’s world. He is knowledgeable without being prepossessing or pedantic, observant well beyond the average, and quick to make connections. “The Meaning of the Act” provides an example: after an evening in which Campion watches an “Egyptian” dancer’s act and another of her spectators is struck on the head, Oates visits Campion and tells him he’s in over his head in espionage matters about which he knows nothing, and he needs to forget everything he saw that evening and think no more about it. Campion offers Oates a drink, and with no further information than his recalling that the injured man was in the code-breaking section of intelligence during the last war, he figures out the whole case while Oates consumes his drink.
Mr Campion and Others is on Ellery Queen’s Queen’s Quorum (1951) list of the most important detective-crime collections of short stories published during the first hundred years of the genre.
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