Anyone who reads my blog regularly (are there such people?) will know that I'm a great lover of golden age crime fiction, and has probably picked up on the fact that my favourite writer from that genre is Margery Allingham. So this was another re-read, but none the worse for that.
Set in the world of fashion and theatre, The Fashion in Shrouds tells a complex story of love, obsession and death. At the centre of all these themes is the beautiful actress Georgia Wells. Lovely, charming, amoral, she seems almost childlike in her inability to really know herself, or to be able to distinguish between acting and real life. Men, as Marlene Dietrich would say, flock around her like moths around a flame, and like those moths they generally get singed, if not burned to death. One of her ex's is found dead at the start of the novel and another dies soon afterwards. Not content with all the men she already has, she poaches the lover of her best friend Valentine. Val is a top couturier, who happens also to be the sister of the great, quiet, unassuming but brilliant private detective Albert Campion. So Albert is involved, and so is his friend Amanda Fitton, a young girl he first met some years earlier.
I've been re-reading a lot of Allingham recently and one of the most recent was Sweet Danger, in which Albert and Amanda first meet -- she was seventeen and he was thirty something and seemingly recovering from an unhappy love affair. They hit it off remarkably well in that novel, though not romantically, but at the end she asks him to wait six years and then catch up with her again. So The Fashion in Shrouds depicts that very moment. In fact these two announce a pretended engagement, which ends dramatically later in the book. But I will not tell you what happens in the end, obviously, though believe me the plot is extremely convoluted and the identity of the murderer came as a surprise to me.
I loved the descriptions of the worlds of London theatre and fashion, perhaps doubly so because my mother was a theatre and fashion designer and was working at that very period. And it was great to meet Val, lovely and sensitive and a little bit flawed. I believe this was the first and last time that any of Campion's family members played a leading role in one of the novels, and the relationship between brother and sister was very nicely done.
Allingham is a really fine writer, and a pleasure to read. But I have to say that if you read this book you will have to make some allowances for the period in which it was written. It gives a most astonishing and presumably accurate picture of London society on the brink of World War Two, though this fact does not get a mention here. But in places it is far from politically correct, so remember that issues of class, race and gender were a good deal less sensitive than they are today. That being said, Allingham has a wonderful ability to see into the hearts of her characters, and writes of human relationships with a great deal of understanding. Lovely. I was sorry to finish it.
