The Case of the Late Pig by Margery Allingham

Murky goings on in an idyllic village

The Case of the Late Pig is a
short but entertaining novel

I found this to be a very enjoyable story, told in the first person by Albert Campion himself, rather than by the author narrating the events as in the other Campion novels.

It is an intriguing plot, which keeps the reader guessing throughout the book, with Campion’s butler, valet and bodyguard, Magersfontein Lugg, playing a big part.

Campion receives a strange message summoning him to the funeral of a former schoolmate, Pig Peters, who he remembers only as an unpleasant bully.

The funeral is a peculiar affair, but afterwards Campion puts all thoughts of Pig Peters behind him.

But when he is called in later, by old friends in rural Suffolk, to investigate a strange death in their village, he is amazed to find that the victim is Peters, who, it appears, has just been killed again, five months after Campion had attended his funeral.

When the body immediately disappears from the police station where it is being kept, Campion sets out to investigate some very odd goings on, helped by his protective, if unconventional, manservant Lugg.

He sees that other people who had attended the original funeral have also turned up in the village and the plot becomes even more murky.

Allingham chose to tell this
Campion story in the first person

First published in 1937 by Hodder and Stoughton, the same year as Allingham’s Campion novel, Dancers in Mourning, The Case of the Late Pig, is a slim book, just 138 pages long in my copy, a Penguin Classic Crime edition.  It also appeared as a short story, in Albert Campion Criminologist, a collection of stories published by Margery Allingham in the same year.

It is the only Campion adventure to be told in the first person by the gentleman sleuth himself, who was initially thought to be a parody of Dorothy L Sayers's hero detective Lord Peter Wimsey,

However, Campion matured into a strong, individual character, who was part-detective and part-adventurer, and he formed the basis for 18 novels and many short stories by Margery Allingham.

I particularly liked The Case of the Late Pig because it was entertaining as well as a whodunit. Although the character of Campion is rooted in the tradition of aristocratic detectives, his behaviour during the novel, and that of his unconventional manservant, give the story a unique feel, and the plot is full of surprises.

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