The Tiger in the Smoke

[sawyl]

Finally, in my short survey of Albert Campion mysteries, Margery Allingham's strange novel The Tiger in the Smoke. Set in 1950s London in a particularly bad smog, it begins with an attempt at blackmail, contains a series of graphic off-stage murders, and ends with a mad dash to find a fragile, lost family heirloom.

Just as Meg Elginbrodde is about to marry Geoffrey Levett, someone has started sending her photographs that appear to show that her late husband Martin may still be alive. Meg's cousin Albert Campion and Detective Inspector Charles Luke force an encounter with the man and manage to arrest him. But immediately after they are forced to release him without charge, the man is murdered. More or less simultaneous, two other events occur: Geoffrey Levett disappears and violent prisoner Jack Havoc escapes by killing his psychiatrist. Havoc then proceeds to go on a killing spree, murdering those who appear to be connected with Martin Elginbrodde, including the caretaker at his solicitor's office.

While the novel is notionally an Albert Campion mystery, Campion is only one among an ensemble cast that includes Meg and her father, the saintly Canon Hubert Avril, Campion's wife Amanda, DI Charlie Luke and Stanislaus Oates of the Yard, and the various members of Canon Avril's large and eccentric household. Jack Havoc, who remains off-stage for much of the novel, is a ferocious force of nature driven by psychotic believe in a form of destiny that justifies his appalling actions — there is a particularly good scene between Havoc and Avril in which their mutually exclusive ideas of Providence collide and contend with each other.

The novel isn't really a crime mystery in the accepted sense and all DI Luke's detecting doesn't actually come to much. Instead events are resolved by a post-mortem missive from Martin Elginbrodde and by the treasure hunt it subsequently provokes. Havoc isn't brought to justice in any conventional way — although he does get his comeuppance — but rather he seems to reach the natural end of the streak of savage, lucky energy that has propelled him through the book.

Strange but intriguing and ultimately rather good.