Mr. Campion's Abdication

Starred review from May 5, 2014
Ripley (The Legend of Hereward) does an excellent job of expanding a story fragment that Allingham’s husband, Pip Youngman Carter, began in 1969. Ripley sets his Albert Campion novel in that same year, with an older detective traveling to the English village of Lindsay Carfax, the scene of a number of unusual occurrences. Most recently, schoolmaster Lemmy Walker disappeared for nine days; upon his return, he refused to discuss his whereabouts. His reticence may be connected with the Carders, the shadowy organization that runs the community; 400 years earlier, the Carders had “something to do with wool.” The danger soon becomes personal for Campion. His artist niece, Eliza Jean Fitton, almost breaks her neck after someone sets a trap on a staircase. Ripley is especially good at recreating the humorous wordplay of the originals (Campion refers to a speaker as suffering from “loose vowels”), and does so in service of a well-crafted plot that plausibly places the detective, who debuted in 1929, in a more contemporary setting. Allingham fans will welcome the news that Severn has commissioned a follow-up, and newcomers will be inspired to seek out her work.

May 1, 2014
After Margery Allingham's death, in 1966, fans feared her beloved Albert Campion series would die with her. Then her husband stepped in and wrote three further novels in her name. When he died, in 1969, he left behind a fragment of a new novel, but it was only in 2012 that Ripley agreed to use the fragment to write a new Campion story. He's produced a whimsical, delightful, witty, entertaining book that's part Jeeves and Wooster, part Laurel and Hardy, and part Miss Marple. Albert is asked by Scotland Yard to visit the village of Lindsay Carfax, where there have been strange goings-on for years, most recently the disappearance of a local schoolteacher, who reappears nine days later, clearly having suffered both mental and physical trauma. Since Albert's niece lives in Lindsay Carfax, he has a good excuse for visiting and launching an undercover investigation. Undeterred by threats to his person and even physical violence, Albert exposes Lindsay Carfax's dark secrets in a story that stretches from the sleepy village all the way to the French Riviera. Charming and full of surprises.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)