Mystery Mile

3.5/5. All together a fun mystery-adventure that is just a bit marred by some dialogue with overwrought accents from the English countryside and casual racism, although the latter is pretty typical of this time period and genre so I generally close both eyes though it still sometimes got a bit uncomfortable to read.

Although Margery Allingham is frequently spoken of together with the other golden age mystery writers, I'm beginning to find her works to be bordering more on adventure rather than strictly cosy mysteries in the style of Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. For one thing, Allingham doesn't actually give you hints along the way like Christie and Sayers often do. The solution can come up out of left field, so if you're the sort of reader who enjoys solving mysteries along with the detective in the novel, Allingham's works probably aren't for you. Luckily though I like to cruise along and only make casual deductions along the way so the lack of hints didn't really bother me much.

The mystery in this one was slightly better than average, although not particularly fantastic or memorable. I did enjoy the whole thing about someone seeming to bring death to the people around him because he is being pursued by a notorious, anonymous criminal mastermind. There were a few red herrings around the place, however, and I thought that the resolution could have been neater with more threads tying in to the main conclusion instead of just having been dead ends all along.

Albert Campion is not exactly a favourite detective for me right now. He feels a bit like a younger version of Lord Peter Wimsey from Sayers's novels but also without as much character. Sometimes his random bursts of humour can get a bit annoying (as it is to the other characters), especially when it can be so random. Sherlock Holmes can sometimes do the same thing where he says something oddly humourous and seemingly random, but which is shown to have some connection with the mystery at hand eventually. Not so much with Campion. He does have those Holmesian moments where a random question or statement is important, but just as often it also seems like he's being random for the sake of it.

My enjoyment of this one was a bit marred by some blatant xenophobia and racism in the story. Again, this is not unusual for a book of this time period, but it was still uncomfortable to read. Spoilers for the whole book: I didn't like that Kettle, being the only “foreigner” in Mystery Mile (and only because he simply wasn't born in the same village), was immediately distrusted and disliked by everyone from all classes, from George and ‘Anry to Giles. Then we learn later that their distrust of him was indeed justified when he's shown to be a lowly agent of Simister's, and also a cowardly and spineless one. I feel like that reinforces that dreadful Other-ness mindset. Same with the way Fergusson Barber was treated throughout the novel. Even if we disregard how he was referred to as ‘the Oriental', he was constantly shown to be an importunate parasite on the good people of Mystery Mile and also something of a base criminal, all of which was once again reinforced when he was revealed to be the mastermind Simister in the end. And then of course we have “Ropey the Chink” which is just... no. I'm pretty sure Ropey is probably a shitty nickname to refer to this person's Qing dynasty queue, and of course just having him as a criminal agent who literally has no lines in the whole book and simply referred to derogatorily as “dirty” and “cunning” and all that. There's also a Japanese magician at the beginning of the book that was also described as “cunning” and ugh, it was all just tiring to read sometimes, especially since I'm ethnically Chinese myself.

Overall, if you can stomach the casual xenophobia and racism that's fairly common in a work from this era, this is not a bad read for people who are already fans of golden age mystery novels and also perhaps for people who want to get into it and would like to have more action and adventure instead of your usual armchair-detecting or solving mysteries within a closed house.