Mr Campion's Séance

June 1, 2020
Albert Campion must work with a succession of three friends on the Metropolitan Police on a slow-motion case that takes more than 20 years to unfold and resolve. Apart from her uncanny resemblance to Agatha Christie, Evadne Childe, the doyenne of British whodunits, is a generally unremarkable widow--her archaeologist husband, Edmund Walker-Pyne, was one of the first casualties of World War II--with a single remarkable talent: the ability to write novels that predict in uncanny detail some real-life crimes. Her perverse gift first reveals itself in 1946, when The Bottle Party Murders provides a blueprint for the robbery and murder of Tony Valetta, the shady owner of the Grafton Club, who was killed weeks after she submitted her manuscript to Veronica Hatherall, her longtime editor at J.P. Gilpin & Co. Alerted to this outrage by his old friend Superintendent Stanislaus Oates, Campion talks to Rags Donovan, the Grafton cigarette girl who saw Evadne with Pierre Le Frog, the mystery man who introduced her to the club, ostensibly for the purposes of research. Six years later, his conversation bears unexpected fruit when Rags is strangled on her way to a meeting with Campion shortly after she's reported glimpsing Le Frog again--and shortly before Evadne's latest novel, Camera Obscuring, predicts the particulars of another crime. Nettled, Campion sets a trap that involves a medium, a pearl necklace, and a long-dead imaginary cousin of his wife's. As usual in Ripley's pastiches, things don't go exactly as he'd planned, and it'll be another 10 years before the case is wrapped up. Wicked fun, sedate yet intricately plotted--a highlight in the series.

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Starred review from June 29, 2020
Life imitates art in Ripley’s ambitious seventh novel featuring Albert Campion, Margery Allingham’s aristocratic amateur sleuth (after 2019’s Mr. Campion’s Visit). In 1946, CID Supt. Stanislaus Oates consults Campion about a murder at London’s Grafton Club, an establishment that skirts the prohibition on selling alcohol by operating as a “bottle club,” ostensibly just serving patrons with booze that they themselves previously purchased. Tony Valletta, the club’s shady owner, was found with a bullet to the back of his head, kneeling in front of a safe, which contained IOUs from a number of rich and powerful men as well as an autographed copy of a mystery novel by bestselling author Evadne Childe. Valletta’s murder is an almost identical match for a fictional one in another novel Childe wrote, which was published before the killing. Campion doesn’t make any progress, but he gets another chance at cracking the case six years later when he’s contacted by a woman who worked in the Grafton Club at the time of the crime. Ripley spins a head-scratching whodunit while effectively recreating Allingham’s tone and characters. This clever continuation of a beloved series keeps getting better.

June 1, 2020
Albert Campion is a sometime consultant to the British Secret Service and also occasionally assists the London police. Beginning in 1940, Ripley's latest story moves through the decades to 1965, with the link being Albert's acquaintance with Evadne Childe, a hugely popular crime-fiction author. In 1940, Childe releases a book that centers on a murder at a seedy club in London's Soho district. But, bizarrely, six months before the book is released, a murder almost identical to the one in Childe's novel takes place at a Soho club. An odd coincidence, think the police, and, while Albert is asked to investigate, he finds no answers. The murder remains unsolved, and in the following years, two more crimes identical to those described in two more Childe books occur. Clearly, this is more than coincidence, driving Albert to determine the connection. Albert remains a winning protagonist, possessed of both eccentric charm and dry wit, and this time Ripley gives him a particularly meaty case, full of noteworthy twists. Another winner in a reliably entertaining series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)