Tom Austin Austin থেকে Bhasur, Uttar Pradesh 232106, India
B22315060H
1920's British detective Albert Campion is my secret crush-of-all-crushes. If I could bring one fictional character to life so I could marry them, it would not be Indiana Jones or . . . okay, I don't really have a list, it's really just Albert Campion and Indiana Jones. But Campion wins in a landslide. I think, in order to love and adore Albert Campion as I do, you have to read the following Margery Allingham books in the following order: --"The Crime at Black Dudley," her first novel, where Campion is introduced via what I feel to be a highly creative technique; the story is told from the perspective of another character who intitially thinks that Campion (because his behavior is so nutty and bizarre) is the killer. He's odd and enigmatic and quirky and hilarious and utterly charming, yet still a totally kick-ass crime-solver who pulls it all together at the end to save the day. --"Sweet Danger," where Campion meets the woman he eventually marries, who kind of annoys me, but he's awesome in this book and his relationship with her is charming and adorable. It's a great creepy supernatural mystery with Campion in top form as a crime-fighting mastermind. --"The Return of Mr. Campion," a collection of essays and short stories which are mostly negligible except an amazing essay called "My Friend Mr. Campion," where Margery Allingham talks about Campion as if he's a real person who is a friend of hers, and how she doesn't invent stuff about him as much as she sort of finds it out as she goes along. There's another essay in the book in a similar style that takes the point of view that Campion and Allingham were secretly in love with each other, and it's very bizarre and romantic. --As soon as you're sold on Detective As Romantic Hero, it's time to move on to what is, for my money, her best book: "Dancers In Mourning." Our Mr. Campion travels to the country where a houseful of nutty London theater artists are being violently killed off one by one. Hired by musical theater superstar Jimmy Sutane to find the killer, he ends up inexplicably falling in love with Sutane's quiet, decidedly UN-theatrical wife, putting him in about ten different kinds of ethical quandaries as the evidence piles up to suggest that her husband is himself the killer. If you like British mysteries, I cannot recommend this book highly enough.