Allingham’s most famous character is Albert Campion, an upper-class amateur detective, who may or may not be actual royalty: we are kept guessing. Part sleuth, part adventurer in the 1920s, Allingham alludes to his career evolving over subsequent decades. Postwar, it is increasingly clear that Campion’s real business is with counterintelligence. The detective stories are merely interruptions to a professional life lived not in the books, but between them.
Referred to early on as a slight, pale, humorous and idiosyncratic young man, Campion is frequently underestimated by those around him – fooled by his facade of seemingly vacuous stupidity. Surrounded by strong, successful women – including an accomplished engineer wife and a fashion designer sister – Campion is in some ways curiously blank. This is surely intentional for a writer so skilled at characterization, presumably to give him a chameleon-like quality, a malleability, and a way of keeping focus on those being investigated around him. As the years progress, Campion becomes more serious, seasoned, and aware of his own mortality, though his wit and humour remains.
Explore the Campion novels here.
“I believe that an author who cannot control her characters is, like a mother who cannot control her children, not really fit to look after them.”
– Margery Allingham
