Monday, November 22, 2010

The Tiger in the Smoke / Margery Allingham

The tiger in the smoke by Margery Allingham (an Albert Campion mystery, #14 ). 249 p.

I read somewhere that this title is Margery Allingham's best Campion book, so I decided to give it a try. Campion himself is a relatively minor character in the story, which I was not expecting. Also, this isn't really a mystery novel as such; that is, the characters are trying to figure something out, but there aren't clues that the reader can follow and deduce things from. (Which is fine, but I was expecting a traditional mystery.) I felt somewhat detached from the characters, so I wasn't all that invested in hoping for a happy ending. Particularly when one of the characters does something incredibly stupid to make a philosophical point, and another does something almost as dumb for no reason at all that I could see. Anway, I'm not on fire to read more Campion books based on this sample.

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