Review: The Case of the Late Pig, by Margery Allingham

Review: The Case of the Late Pig, by Margery Allingham

by Rich Horton

Margery Allingham (1904-1966) was one of the "big four" women writers during the so-called "Golden Age of Detective Fiction", the others being Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh. Her best known character was Albert Campion, an aristocrat using an assumed name who acts as a detective sometimes, sometimes a spy. She wrote 18 novels and many short stories about him, though in several of the novels he is a relatively minor characters. Her husband Philip Youngman Carter completed an unfinished novel after her death, and wrote two more; and some time after his death a novel he had left unfinished was complete by Mike Ripley, and Ripley has continued to produce about 10 more Albert Campion novels, the latest appearing as recently as 2023. There was a BBC series called Campion in the late '80s (shown on PBS in the US) which adapted a few of the books.

I believe I read one or two Campion novels back in my teens but I have no memory of them. Several years ago I reads one of Allingham's non-Campion mysteries, Black Plumes (1940), which I quite enjoyed. So when I ran across a 1989 reprint of the 1937 novel The Case of the Late Pig, which Avon published about the time it was adapted into an episode of the BBC series, I picked it up, and I read it this past weekend, mostly while on an airplane to Boston to attend Readercon.

The Case of the Late Pig is a rather short novel, around 40,000 words. In fact, it was originally published in a collection of Campion short stories, but soon reprinted in a standalone book. It's told in first person by Campion -- apparently the only book to feature him as narrator. As the book opens, he is in bed, reading an anonymous letter, which announces the funeral of one R. I. Peters. Peters -- called Pig -- was a bully at the school Campion attended, and went on to a criminal career. Campion hardly regrets his passing, but attends the funeral anyway, and is surprised to recognize another schoolmate, Gilbert Whippet, who, he learns, received a similar anonymous letter. But there was nothing suspicious about Peters' death, and Campion forgets about it until a few months later a friend of his, Leo Pursuivant calls him down to his estate to investigate a murder. And the victim is unmistakably Pig Peters, though the man is known to Leo as Oswald Harris.

What follows is a fast-moving evolution of multiple motives (Oswald Harris made enemies easily, and particularly in this little place, where he proposed to buy up a popular property and develop it vulgar ways), multiple identities, many suspects, and some real danger for Albert and some of his friends. There's a bit of oddly undeveloped sexual intrigue between Albert and Leo's pretty daughter Janet. (The book is written in a way that seems to suggest that Janet and Albert may have met in a previous story.) There is more than one criminal, and Gilbert Whippet reappears in a surprising way. The crime itself is resolved in a pleasurably enough way. 

As a mystery, it's fine but minor. The best parts of the book are the ironical portrayals of the characters. There are a number of fine comic bits, and as I said some suggestinon of real peril. Campion is an engaging narrator. His somewhat brutish servant, the ex-burglar Lugg, is a nice sidekick. The narration is rapid and easy, never particularly deep. I am told that Campion's character deepens in later novels -- this story is fine but no more than that.