Campion uses his detection skills and solves the mystery before the cops
Mr Albert Campion
is asked by Joyce, the fiancée of one of his friends, to trace a distant
relative she calls Uncle Andrew, who has gone missing from the house in Cambridge
where they both live.The cover of the newest
available edition
But before Campion
and Joyce have even left London for Cambridge, they find out that the body of
Uncle Andrew has been found in a river. He had been bound hand and foot with
cord and shot in the head.
In this
fourth novel to feature the mysterious Mr Campion, the author, Margery Allingham, allows
hints to be dropped by one of the characters that Campion is from a prominent
British aristocratic family, giving the reader a tantalising clue about who he really is.
Campion
takes Joyce back to Socrates Close, the large old house where she lives with her
Great Aunt, Caroline Faraday, the widow of a famous Cambridge academic, and the other members of the strange and dysfunctional family, who she helps Mrs
Faraday to take care of.
Then Campion
goes to see his old friend Marcus Featherstone, who is a solicitor and Joyce’s
fiancé, to get some background about the case. When Marcus asks for his
professional assistance, Campion says: ‘I must warn you. I’m no detective, but
of course I’m open to help. What d’you think I can do for you exactly?’ This is
interesting because although we see him go on to use his skills to solve the
murder, he clearly does not see himself as a detective.
From the
previous novels, we know that Campion is well-educated, with quiet authority
and that he is not afraid to put himself in danger to help others. He lives
above a police station in London with an eccentric manservant and is reputed to
be a good man to call upon in a crisis. He appears to be more of a gentleman
adventurer than a private detective.
Nevertheless,
he goes to Socrates Close to meet the formidable Caroline Faraday, who, because
she thinks she knows his family, invites him to stay.
He uses his
skill and experience to work out what is going on at Socrates Close when a second member
of the family dies and another one is injured while they are both still inside the
house.
Campion follows
up the clues he finds, such as the mysterious symbol drawn on the outside of one of
the library windows and a huge footprint found in the flower bed below.Peter Davison played Campion in a BBC TV
adaptation of Margery Allingham's novels
Although he
works alongside his policeman friend, Stanislaus Oates, a senior Scotland Yard
detective, it is Campion who works out what has been happening in the house and
exposes the person responsible.
Police at the Funeral, the fourth Campion novel, was published in Britain in 1931 and is the first of the series not to have organised crime as a plot element. Instead, it is about a wealthy family living together in a big house who are constantly having petty squabbles. It is the first real detective story by Margery and is considered by many of her readers to be one of her best novels.
She was later judged to be one of the four Queens of Crime, along with her contemporaries, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and Ngaio Marsh, who were also writing during the Golden Age of detective fiction.
Police at the Funeral is available from or
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