UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Margery Allingham, The Tiger in the Smoke (1952) and The Case of the Late Pig (1937)

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.

 

David Carkeet, Double Negative (1980)

           I don’t usually read academic mysteries; my actual experience as a college teacher provided me with more laughs and puzzles than the books could. But David Carkeet’s Double Negative, about a bunch of linguists studying the development of language in small children, is different. For one thing, these people are not in a college setting; they work in a day-care center that is also an observing laboratory called the Wabash Institute.

            The main character here, Jeremy Cook, reminds me of Kingsley Amis’s comic hero in Lucky Jim.  That book isn’t a mystery, but the title character is an academic type whose comic bumbling includes a disastrous speech before a group he despises.  There’s a similar scene in this book.

            Although they aren’t at a college, there’s still plenty of academic infighting among the linguists at the Wabash Institute, and at one point they all contemplate with horror the possibility that, if their funding dries up, they might have to teach. The local police lieutenant who comes to investigate the murders at Wabash regards with contempt the linguists’ jealousies and what he sees as their cowardly fear of judgment. Lieutenant Leaf is one of Carkeet’s more interesting characters—funny, shrewd, and full of odd expressions that continually surprise Jeremy Cook: “the whole boiling” is Leaf’s phrase for “the whole thing,” and at one point he says “the law can’t let everyone run around rantum-scantum,” meaning presumably “harum-scarum,” except that rantum-scantum is really an archaic expression for sexual intercourse, and I assume a little joke of the linguist author.

            Some of the characters have names indicating their dispositions or habits: Jeremy’s friend, who is accident-prone, is named Ed Woeps; and the gossip-monger of the group, always asking you questions so that he has something to pass on to the next person, is named Aaskhugh.

            The fear of judgment that Lieutenant Leaf despises in these academics is really a theme of the book. Carkeet explores personal likes and dislikes, the wish to be liked, and the flimsy, sometimes misguided reasons on which affections or aversions get formed. The mystery is finally solved when Jeremy figures out the private linguistic forms by which one toddler indicates the people he likes or dislikes. And the crimes begin when an accident turns into a hit-and-run because the driver is afraid of the public exposure his recklessness will bring. The book ends with the little group of linguists, their number reduced by one who was murdered and one who has been jailed for it, reexamining and trying to modify their judgments of each other. I liked it; perhaps you will as well.