Rating: 4/5
Review:
A decent early work
Margery Allingham was a truly great writer of detective
fiction from the Golden Age. The White
Cottage Mystery is her first published book, and her full brilliance had yet to
flower. I quite enjoyed it as a period
piece, but it's nothing like as good as Allingham's later Campion books.
This is a solidly constructed mystery set a few years after
the Great War. A murder takes place in a
small, respectable Home Counties village which Challoner of the Yard and his
son Jerry investigate. Facts emerge
about the murdered man which lead to investigations in Paris and Mentone,
revelations about sinister, powerful international criminal organisations and
so on. It's done decently enough, but
it's a puzzle with somewhat crude dressing rather than the sort of fine novel
as Allingham went on to write.
Characters are a little stereotypical, there's a rather thinly painted
romance and so on. The prose is good,
but there's nothing of the brilliance of, say, "She bustled off, leaving a
tang of schoolmistress in the air," (from Death of a Ghost) which came to
characterise her writing.
Anything by Margery Allingham is worth reading, including
this. It's a readable and quite
enjoyable Golden Age mystery – just don't expect it to be on a par with her
later work.
(I received a free ARC via Netgalley.)
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