MARGERY ALLINGHAM: TRAITOR'S PURSE

Character List

Albert Campion – aristocrat; chosen an unconventional career under a pseudonym as a prof. adventurer

Lady Amanda Fitton – Campion’s “lieut” and true love

Magersfontein Lugg – Campion’s servant for 17 years; heavyset; formerly a burglar

Stanislaus Oates – Scotland Yard

Superintendent Hutch – senior officer in the local county police force

Robert Anscombe – Secretary to the Masters of Bridge; smuggled contraband in caves under the hill

Miss Anscombe – Anscombe’s sister, age 70, a good woman, strong and true

Lee Aubrey – brilliant academic, Principal of the Bridge Institute (Masters of Bridge research institute)

Mr. Pyne – owner of a business evacuated to Bridge | Mrs. Ericson – leads women patriotic volunteers

Sir Henry Bull – High-ranking Treasury minister and Senior Master of Bridge

Amnesia as a Literary Trope in Traitor’s Purse by Margery Allingham

What has happened to the amnesiac? Why is he in a county hospital? Has he killed a police officer? Will he be hanged? Why did he have a lot of money on him when he was found? “There was danger behind him and something tremendously important ahead” (1).

“Everyone was turning to himself for assurance. He dared not reveal the dreadful emptiness of his mind. Somehow he must struggle on, blind and halfwitted though he was. There was to be no outside help. He was quite alone” (17).

Amnesia is a commonly used storytelling plot device in thrillers and romances. Amnesia offers a fresh perspective: characters can re-evaluate their actions and motivations. Amnesia creates conflict, forcing characters to re-evaluate their lives and relationships. Amnesia creates suspense and mystery as the character tries to piece together their past. The amnesiac often regains memories after being hit on the head.

In Traitor’s Purse by Margery Allingham, Campion is knocked unconscious at the police station. When he wakes, he recalls the events before his arrival at the hospital. 

Other Examples: The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins: Rachel suffers from amnesia related to alcohol consumption and wakes up with no memory of what happened the night before. In the Woods by Tana French, Robert Ludlum’s Bourne Identity, The English Patient, The Time Traveler’s Wife, Memento (Christopher Nolan), Wolverine (Marvel), Ursula Le Guin’s City of Illusions, Severance

Flashes of Memory – There’s Something Important to Do

A #15 bus passes by. “The sight jolted him and for an instant recollection rushed at him in a great warm sweep of bright colors, only to recede again, leaving him desperate. Something was frighteningly urgent and important … and the responsibility concerned was tremendous” (2).

“The recollection [of Aubrey’s house] came as Amanda’s name had come; not as a raising of the curtain of darkness which hung between the front and the back of his mind, but as a sudden rent in it which flashed a whole scene from the brightness within, only to close again” (3).

Peter Wimsey (Dorothy Sayers) vs. Albert Campion (Margery Allingham)

The New Albert Campion

A. S. Byatt: “Campion was invented, according to Margery Allingham, as a parody of Wimsey, hiding an aristocratic background under a pseudonym. Both had menservants full of character – Wimsey had Bunter, who had kept him alive during the first world war, and Campion had the brilliantly named and wonderfully realised ex-cat-burglar, run to fat, Magersfontein Lugg.”

In the first Campion novel by Margery Allingham, The Crime at Black Dudley, Albert Campion is described as a “fresh-faced young man with the tow-coloured hair and the foolish, pale-blue eyes behind tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles” and “quite inoffensive, just a silly ass.” In many of the Campion books, he gave the impression of an upper-class silly ass. But when trouble struck, he rose to the occasion with resourcefulness and intelligence.

Amanda says they’ve been engaged for 8 years and were to be married the next month. She wants to break it off. She suggests he’s sensible and a bit cold – “fishlike.”

Campion’s “new mood of reckless determination, which he suspected was completely foreign to his nature, was still in complete possession of him” (5). “[I]t seemed to him that in that moment he actually struggled up and out of a whole customary system of living and emerged a small naked essence of the basic man.” (4).

Miss Anscombe gives Campion her brother’s diary, which mentions his repentance and Minute Fifteen. Campion listens poorly, is impatient, and shows a terrible bedside manner toward her. Later, we learn that Campion “accepted his disability and set about circumnavigating it with a dogged patience which was characteristic of him” (16).

“His was the age which had never known illusion, the grimly humorous generation which from childhood had both expected and experienced the seamier side” (12).

“For the first time in his life he felt completely adult. His hesitancy, his qualms, his intellectual doubts seemed suddenly the stuff of childhood” (21). He proposes that they marry the next day. Amanda visits him in jail. He realizes “that something revolutionary, he was not at all sure that it was not evolutionary, must have taken place within him. He had grown old, or seen a great light, or else his blundering feet were on the ground at last” (19).

All About Amanda in Traitor’s Purse by Margery Allingham

The first time Campion sees Amanda Fitton, he notices her heart-shaped face and intelligent eyes. The second time he sees her, she picks him up in a car, and he wonders if she’s his wife.

At the Principal’s House in the Bridge Institute, he recognizes her as Amanda, whose “vivid friendly personality still warmed and comforted him like the glow of a coal fire” (3). She’s the “first real and familiar thing to emerge in the terrifying darkness of his mind” (3).

“Every time he set eyes on her she became clearer and dearer to him. … she was real and solid, a living part of that self which he was rediscovering so painfully” (6). “With what was obviously a habit with him in difficult moments,” he looked for Amanda. She “always seemed to materialize at the right moment” (10).

“He must have taken her for granted for years now.” This truth “shook him off his guard” (20). Campion feels all is lost. Unperturbed, Amanda says, “There are times one has to do a miracle. This is one of those. You think one up.” “Her optimism was childlike and unbounded” (20). With a “profound and lovely faith in myself,” he takes the passage beside the old-fashioned shop under the Nag. He makes his way through the caves under the Council Chamber.

About Traitor’s Purse by Margery Allingham, A. S. Byatt writes, “If Wimsey becomes human when he sees Harriet Vane, a crime-writer, being tried for a murder she did not commit, Campion becomes human when his superficial memory disappears, leaving his real self naked to his real feelings.”

Campion’s Manservant, Lugg

Albert Campion knocks Hutch out, steals his car, and heads a newsagent’s shop in Coachingford. He sees a “very remarkable person,” a bald man with a melancholy face and expressionless eyes.

Campion confides in Lugg. Lugg says, “You’re all right. You’re at ‘ome. … You’re with yer own” (11). He’s a nurse and ally. “You feel as you do sometimes, when you first wake up in the morning in a strange bed. Just for a minute you’ve got a hold of yerself all right but you don’t know where you are nor what’s gone before. You’re like a man living in that minute, aren’t yer?” (11).

Let’s compare Campion and Lugg (Margery Allingham) vs. Nero Wolfe and Archie (Rex Stout) vs. Lord Peter Wimsey and Bunter (Dorothy L. Sayers).

Pyne and Campion in Traitor’s Purse by Margery Allingham

Pyne says they were in the U.S. together in the “old days,” though Pyne had met Campion only three days earlier and didn’t know Hutch at all. Later, Hutch asks Campion to prove his identity. Pyne had sent Hutch an anonymous note hinting that Campion was an imposter.

Pyne tells Aubrey and Campion that the man the police are looking for is 35, 6’2”, and blond, with a thin, powerful build. It’s obvious to Campion that Pyne is on to him.

A sinister guy with a gun, hired by Pyne, arrives at the newsagents and tries to bribe Campion to leave town.

What’s Pyne’s deal? What is he doing here? Who does Pyne think Campion is?

The Masters of Bridge

Campion and Hutch had previously arranged a covert mission into the nearby town of Bridge. Hutch says all town business is at the discretion of the Masters of Bridge, a hereditary organization of local dignitaries. Rich, powerful, and secretive, the “little kings” own everything.

Margery Allingham and the Stuff of Poetry and Romance

Campion: “She should not desert him. … Amanda was his. He needed her …” (4). “His sense of possession was tremendous. It was the possessiveness of the child, of the savage, of the dog, unreasonable and unanswerable” (6).

Campion: In “crept a new fear. It was a fear for Amanda. … There was something from which he must protect her. She was a responsibility of his, quite as much a responsibility as that other which was rapidly assuming such enormous proportions” (6).

Campion experiences “a burning, raging, invigorating thing, the stuff of poetry and high imagining, the fountain-spring of superhuman endurance and endeavor” (12). “[S]omething new had appeared on his emotional horizon. … It was a faith, a spiritual and romantic faith. … a deep and lovely passion for his home, his soil, his blessed England, his principles, his breed, his Amanda, and Amanda’s future children” (12).

Campion: “Losing Amanda was going to be like losing an eye. Life would be a little less than half without her” (20).

Standing Our Ground and Fighting Back

In Traitor’s Purse by Margery Allingham, Miss Anscombe tells Albert Campion: “These are unconventional times. … It’s no good being conventional in a world which is blowing up all round one. When the streets become a shambles one has to raise one’s skirts” (13).

“Campion began to suffer the tortures of the damned. The war, with all its noisy horror as he knew it in the battle zones, was very close to him. He could see and hear it over Britain, not merely as air raids but as invasion …. [He] saw the whole country suddenly hit in the wind by an entirely unexpected blow. The magnificent jingle from the end of King John came into his mind: ‘Come the three corners of the world in arms / And we shall shock them. Naught shall make us rue, / If England to itself do rest but true.’”

The Minute Fifteen War Loan in Traitor’s Purse by Margery Allingham

Campion visits Sir Henry Bull, who says Minute Fifteen is a war loan. The scheme: flood the UK with large sums of counterfeit money, which would devalue the pound sterling, cause inflation to skyrocket, and destabilize the economy and the government. The hundreds of lorries in the cavern were for the distribution of the counterfeit money.

The money was to be posted at the same time as radio news about the loan, disguised as social security payments to the poor. “Vast numbers of needy folk in all the poorer parts of the country were suddenly to be presented with a handful of money and instructions to spend it” (20). They would have accepted the money without question.

Operation Bernhard was a real-life German plot – masterminded by Himmler’s SS – to flood wartime Britain with counterfeit currency. However it didn’t become public until after the end of the war. Margery Allingham was unaware of it at the time the novel was written. (Mike Ripley)

A New Dark Ages and World Barbarism

Bull says he’s worried about “Treachery on a vast scale everywhere I look” (16). Bull describes the world they’re living in: “Enemy soldiers disguised as nuns, carrying machine-guns and portable bicycles, descending by parachute. Armed secret societies. Microphones in the walls of railway carriages” (17). They’re at risk of a new Dark Ages and “world barbarism.

Campion’s “Ordeal by Fool” – He tells an officer, “This is a million times more important and more urgent than any air raid siren.” It’s so vital that if “you don’t bring me someone in authority immediately I don’t think you’ll wake up in the same world tomorrow” (19).

Taking risks for a worthy cause: Hutch puts his 30 years on the force on the line to smuggle Campion into the Masters’ Council Chamber. Later, Hutch opens the door and writes on an envelope that Oates has been located. Hutch writes that Amanda is waiting for him in a car. Hutch is writing because Campion had cracked his jaw.

While in jail, Campion listens to the clock chime in 15-minute increments. His memories returned, Campion still can’t remember the details of the Enemy’s attack or the identity of the Enemy. The enemy also wasn’t named in Rogue Male. The question: Why not name the enemy?

The Traitor in Traitor’s Purse by Margery Allingham

Campion and Hutch realize Pyne couldn’t have carried out the plan by himself. He’s a businessman, not a fanatic. The mastermind, Pyne’s employer, must be Aubrey, who had the money, space in the caves, and local volunteer labor needed to address government envelopes.

Bull says Aubrey is a “curious product, part genius, part crank. One moment he’s doing untold service and the next he’s trying to advance a hare-brained scheme for running the country” (20).

Aubrey: “Poor Campion here, who probably believes he’s done his duty, in reality he has betrayed his country and probably civilization by his interference.”

Aubrey “believed implicitly that he alone was capable of directing the Empire and had been fully prepared to destroy the whole structure of its economic life in order to get into command” (21).

Margery Allingham and Her Place in the Canon

Albert Campion has a place alongside Hercule Poirot, Jane Marple, and Lord Peter Wimsey as one of the great detectives of the English Golden Age of crime writing. Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh are the four great Queens of the English mystery. Many said that Allingham was the most versatile and entertaining of the four.

Agatha Christie once said every Campion story was distinctive and didn’t rely on plot twists for impact.

Dorothy Sayers once wrote, “Miss Allingham gains by [her] versatility. Her thrillers are the more convincing for the habit of accuracy imposed on her by detective writing, and her more intellectual problems enlivened by the sense of colour and movement that invades them from the thriller side of her mental make-up. … [H]er writing is, in fact, excellent.”

Campion probably started as an archetype of the young, smart “gay set” that enjoyed country house weekends, fast open-top cars, and “getting into scrapes.” He developed into a rounded, sympathetic character despite, rather than because of, the advantages of his birth. This is why Campion is one of the great characters of the Golden Age of English crime writing. (Mike Ripley)

More About Margery Allingham

Mike Ripley: Traitor’s Purse was written in 1940 when Britain seemed to stand alone against overwhelming odds. The threat was very real.

A. S. Byatt: “It was written and sent in for publication in 1940, when bombs were falling every night. … Their house became the air raid precautions post, and Allingham found herself taking on a whole new life of administration and distribution of gas masks, splints, spades, buckets, rubber boots and so on.”

A. S. Byatt: Margery Allingham was involved in the reception of the 90 unaccompanied evacuee children in the village. However, eight busloads of entire families arrived – 300 people to be accommodated in a village of 650. Allingham persuaded the villagers to take the families at least for one night. She turned an empty house into a maternity ward. She ordered provisions with a new energy and efficiency, and remarked: “It’s taken me some time to realise it and longer to admit it but so far the war has been my salvation.”

A. S. Byatt: “During the first half of 1940, she worked almost furtively on Traitor’s Purse, hiding in the garden, or secreting the manuscript in a biscuit tin during bombings. She wrote: “You’ve no idea how difficult it is to finish a modest thriller when all your neighbours are mucking about in the dawn looking for nuns with sub-machine guns and collapsible bicycles to arrive by parachute.”

A. S. Byatt calls Traitor’s Purse a “startlingly good book. It is taut and trim and full of delicious shocks and narrative tension. It is original and moving and amusing. How anyone, working in brief fragments of time, could imagine and hold together the world of this story and tell it infallibly at the right pace is hard to imagine. … In a 1940 review in Time & Tide, [Margery Allingham] wrote: ‘the thriller proper is a work of art as delicate and precise as a sonnet’. She knew what she was doing, and what her forms required.”

BBC Campion Series

Albert Campion (Margery Allingham) isn’t as widely known a fictional detective as, say, Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie). There aren’t many productions of the books. The BBC Campion series with lead actor Peter Davison is quite good.