Today was a lovely sunny day, and I spent quite a lot of it sat in the garden reading Margery Allingham’s 1931 detective novel Police at the Funeral. Something I discovered in previous book-a-day challenges is that reading a murder mystery in a day is really fun and rewarding – because you don’t have to wait very long to discover whodunnit.
Police at the Funeral is a curious title for a novel that doesn’t include any funerals, though it does have more than one death. At the outset, though, series detective Albert Campion is prevailed upon to look for a friend’s fiancée’s missing uncle. Campion thinks the thing is likely to be a case of someone getting het up over nothing, but when he meets the fiancée, Joyce, he recognises that she is not given to hysteria. Her uncle is missing, and it rather looks like he could be dead.
We soon get to know about her family. While she is looked on kindly by most of the relatives she has grown up with, the same cannot be said between the rest of them. Her great-aunt rules a household with a rod of iron, despising and pitying her various adult offspring who still live with her, and still feud and squabble as though they were in the nursery. Great-Aunt Caroline thinks ill of the modern era and the household still behaves as though Queen Victoria is on the throne. It’s a very Ivy Compton-Burnett set up, though of course the style of the novel isn’t remotely like one she’d have written.
“There they are, a family forty years out of date, all vigorous energetic people by temperament, all, save for the old lady, without their fair share of brain, and herded together in that mausoleum of a house, tyrannised over by one of the most astounding personalities I’ve ever encountered. […] There’s no vent to the suppressed hatreds, petty jealousies, desires and impulses of any living soul under that roof. The old lady holds the purse strings and is the first and final court of appeal. Not one of her dependants can get away without having to face starvation, since not one of them is remotely qualified to earn a sixpence.”
Before long – and not remotely to the reader’s surprise – it turns out that the uncle is dead. His body is found in the river – hands and feet having been tied together, with a shotgun wound through the head. Nobody truly mourns him, since none of the family likes or respects each other, but they still want the truth to come out.
But… this death is quickly followed by another. (Unlike the blurb to my edition, I shan’t spoil more than that!)
Albert Campion is a fun detective. I’ve read a couple of other books in which he appears – I have to admit the schtick of him looking vacantly stupid is a bit unnecessary, and I’ve not read the books where he is apparently most openly a parody of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, but once you get those things out the way, there’s a lot to like. He has a funny way with words, and a rather sweetly teasing relationship with the inspector on the case – Inspector Stanislaus Oates, whose son is Campion’s godson. His actual detection is all rather hurried at the end, but that’s fine.
And it’s a very satisfying solution, with enough clues along the way that we don’t feel cheated. I loved the set up with the horrendous family, and Great-Aunt Caroline is just the right amount of terrifying and formidable for the reader to actually quite admire her dominance. Joyce is a very likeable character to have along the way too, and both insider and outsider to the family, so we don’t feel too buried with a group of appalling adult-children. I don’t remember finding Allingham’s writing so enjoyably funny and dramatic before, so this was a goody.
I think this is my favourite of the Allinghams I’ve read – which is your favourite Allingham?