Traitor's Purse: The Albert Campion Mysteries

"Yes. This was her first wartime mystery of two. She wrote it in late 1939, or early 1940. It features her regular detective Albert Campion, who she’d been writing about since the late 1920s. He’s in, I think, at least ten books through the 1920s and 1930s. At the beginning, she’s writing him as almost a parody of an aristocratic amateur sleuth. He’s very silly. That slowly morphs into him becoming a more serious, rounded character. His silliness becomes a facade that he puts on when he doesn’t want people to realize that he’s actually very astute. What’s so interesting about this book is that she completely formally deconstructs the detective novel as people have known it to date. It begins with Campion waking up in hospital with total amnesia. He doesn’t know who he is, or where he is, or why he’s there. He’s had an accident, he’s suffered a head injury, and he has no idea what’s going on. But he just has this overwhelming feeling that there’s something he’s supposed to be doing — something really important. He doesn’t know what it is. He has to piece together his own identity, and the case that he must be working on, from what he overhears other people saying and from contextual clues, and from who comes to see him in hospital. He’s solving the mystery of himself at the same time as trying to solve a wartime mystery. “The classic whodunnit had been domestic. But wartime enforced a much more communal way of living” In it, there’s a gang of counterfeit currency conspirators trying to flood Britain with fake money in order to destabilize the economy, and make Britain more likely to be defeated in the war. Interestingly, lots of the reviews for this book at the time were really good, but the one thing that comes up a lot is people saying that it’s all very far-fetched. Obviously, people at the time thought, there couldn’t be secret Nazi collaborators making fake coins or dropping fake banknotes. But then about 15 years later, Allingham was sent a press cutting from a German fan saying ‘no, actually you were right. This really was happening.’ It was called Operation Bernhard. It was absolutely real. She’d imagined something that was actually going on. I think so. Yes. I think J.K. Rowling has also cited Allingham as her favourite of all the Golden Age crime writers. Allingham wasn’t content to just churn out books in the same old classic mould. She was always trying to do something a bit different each time. Actually her publishers really hated this about her. She was supposed to be on the crime list, but a couple of times they said: ‘We can’t put this out as a crime novel—people will feel really shortchanged.’ They would move her to the general literature list. She was always a bit awkward in that sense."