A review by omegabeth
Mystery Mile by Margery Allingham

3.0

This is the second of Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion novels. I was vaguely familiar with her work, but realized while I know Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers well, I had never dipped into her work. After 2 books, I find Albert Campion quite enjoyable, although most of the other characters are underdrawn. Allingham is a strong writer who sets the mood very effectively. The flip side of that is that there are portions of dialogue that are so full of time-and class- bound slang and jargon and phonetic spellings for accents that they are unintelligible. These first 2 are also primarily adventure books, with suspense and ever-present very bad people who kidnap and spy and kill. There are some unknowns as to exactly how things are happening and who is working for the bad guys, but the reader does not have all of the information, so the details of what the secondary characters are saying don’t really matter very much at all.

I will read the next one in the series, on the assumption that the teaser from the end of this one accurately indicates a shift to more mystery and less suspense/adventure, and we shall see.