Traitor’s Purse by Margery Allingham (1941)

Of the four Queens of Crime, I have a feeling that Margery Allingham might be my favourite, though I discovered this titan of the Golden Age only recently. When I was young I read Agatha Christie, simultaneously the most successful and least stylish (prose-wise) of the quartet, but on trying Ngaio Marsh found her punishingly dull.

I also enjoyed a selection of Dorothy L Sayers’ shorter works (and was particularly fond of her stories about a travelling wine merchant and amateur sleuth, Montague Egg)… but have only the vaguest memory of starting a Campion book by Allingham. Yet, if my grandmother had read her instead of Christie and therefore exposed me to her first, I suspect that she’d have been the writer I now remember fondly from my early years as a reader. Such is life.

Traitor’s Purse is a short novel, just over 200 pages, with such breakneck pacing (and chapters that end largely in cliffhangers) that it’s hard to blurb. Its American title – the confoundingly stupid and blunt “The Sabotage Murder Mystery” – somewhat gives the game away, although it’s not even really accurate.

(Sidenote: why do American publishers consistently denude British titles of intrigue and allusion? It’s like they assume that US readers have no frame of reference or interest in looking things up. For example, they changed the title of Stephen Fry’s revenge novel The Stars’ Tennis Balls, from a Jacobean quote about fate, to simply “Revenge”.)

What I can say is that Traitor’s Purse opens with series character Albert Campion in hospital with a head injury. It’s 1941, and as he rises to consciousness he overhears a policeman in the hall outside telling a nurse that he’s suspected of killing an officer. What’s worse, he can’t remember a thing, not even who he is, except that he must achieve an aim of national importance and every second counts…

More than that I won’t say. The book is constantly interesting, exciting, and wittily written. It has the pacing and vivid scenery of a feature film. Allingham achieves the economy of Christie’s writing with none of the woodenness, as well as the literate stylishness of Sayers’ work without its longueurs. It’s not really a murder mystery, although a master criminal is exposed among the characters.

It is nonetheless a nigh-on-perfect Golden Age thriller, constantly suspenseful, with well-drawn types including Campion’s girl Friday Amanda and classic English settings like an old country town that has picturesque roots. Allingham’s portraits of people and places are exquisite, all the more so because you never feel as though the story stops while she relates, for example, the myth of how a town’s name came to be.

The secret of what’s happening that Campion has to prevent is clever, and in fact anticipated a real wartime plot that was only revealed once the war had ended, making Allingham prescient as well as talented. You can see why the novelist AS Byatt described the book as having the most amazing plot of any thriller she knew. Traitor’s Purse is pulp adventure elevated to art.

Rating: 4/4

Pictured edition: Vintage