Episode 92: All About Margery Allingham and Albert Campion

SPEAKERS
Sarah Harrison, Carolyn Daughters, Mike Ripley

Sarah Harrison: Welcome to Tea Tonic & Toxin, a book club and podcast for anyone who wants to explore the best mysteries and thrillers ever written. I’m your host, Sarah Harrison.

Carolyn Daughters: And I’m your host Carolyn Daughters. Pour yourself a cup of tea, a gin and tonic …

Sarah Harrison: … but not a toxin …

Carolyn Daughters: And join us on a journey through 19th and 20th century mysteries and thrillers, every one of them a game changer.

OUR SPONSOR
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Carolyn Daughters  01:41

I’m very excited about today’s guest. We got we got up early for this one.

Sarah Harrison  01:45

We did. Our guest is at a little bit of a distance from us. We have Mike Ripley all the way from … where are you calling from?

Mike Ripley  01:54

Mike East Anglia, outside of London in England.

Sarah Harrison  01:59

In England, awesome, our international, fabulous guest today, Mike Ripley. We’re really excited to talk to him about his book, and about

Carolyn Daughters  02:11

about all, all 12 of the books, actually, and also about, generally speaking, Margery Allingham. We’re discussing Margery Allingham, the Albert Campion canon, and his involvement in that.

Carolyn Daughters  02:36

Mike Ripley is the author of 28 novels, including the award-winning Angel series of comedy thrillers, and one of the few authors to win the Crime Writers Last Laugh award twice.

Mike Ripley  02:39

Three times, three times.

Sarah Harrison  02:53

How did we get this incorrect bio?

Mike Ripley  02:55

I won again last week.

Sarah Harrison  02:59

Oh, congratulations!

Carolyn Daughters  03:00

For Mr. Champion’s Christmas. From 1989 to 2008 he was a crime fiction critic for The Daily Telegraph and then The Birmingham Post, reviewing more than 950 crime novels. That’s a lot of crime novels. He co-edited three volumes of fresh blood stories by new British writers including Ian Rankin, Lee Child, Ken Bruin, Charlie Higson, and Christopher Brookmeyer. He was also a script writer on the BBC series Lovejoy. Mike Ripley completed the third Albert Campion novel, left unfinished on the death of Pip Youngman Carter, who was the husband of Margery Allingham in 1969. Mr. Campion’s Farewell was published in the UK and the US in 2014 ,and Mike has continued the Campion series annually with the 12th and final book in the series, Mr. Campion’s Christmas appearing in 2024. Described by The Times as England’s funniest crime writer, Mike is a respected critic of crime fiction, writing for The Guardian, Daily Telegraph, and The Times. He writes the monthly Getting Away with Murder column on Shots magazine. He was a series editor of the Astera crime and top notch thriller imprints, rescuing and reviving more than 100 crime novels and thrillers that didn’t deserve to be forgotten. He also became known as the unofficial historian of the British thriller after the publication of Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang, which won the 2018 HRF Keating award for nonfiction. Welcome, Mike. That’s quite a bio you have there. That’s awesome.

Mike Ripley  04:42

Well, I think that’s all we have time for, isn’t it?

Carolyn Daughters  04:45

And that wraps up this episode, which was a brilliant episode. We shared a lot of information. It was a good conversation.

Sarah Harrison  04:55

Mike, I was so excited when I found you on the internet. We read Traitor’s Purse as part of our podcast, and we were looking around for folks to interview about Margery Allingham, and you were one of the most unique people in that you had continued her work, which I thought was amazing. So we are really excited to talk to you, especially about that angle, but I want to go back to where you got started with Allingham. How did you find her first book? What was it? What was the read like?

Mike Ripley  05:33

Well, my first encounter with her was in the year she died, actually, 1966. I was living in Cambridge. I was not at the university, but I was just living in the town. But I knew a professor at the university who read detective stories all the time, and he recommended Margery Allingham to me, and the first couple Albert Campion books, I think, were Sweet Danger and Mystery Mile. They were what were known as her thrillers, rather than whodunits and I was hooked. I just thought, great. I’d never heard of this woman, and because then I tried to find out about her, and found she’d died that year. So I read what I what I could, but I always remembered that in mystery mile, there’s a map at the front of the book which shows the island of mystery mile, and it’s connected to the mainland by a thing called the strood, right, which is like a causeway. And few years later, when I’d been I’d been to university, and so I was looking for a job, and I saw a job advertised at the University of Essex, which I got. And so I was looking around for places to live. So I got a map out, and I saw this island off the Essex coast, suspiciously like the one in mystery mile, and it was convict connected to the mainland by a causeway called the strood What? So I thought, This is fate. I can remember this, so I must. I never actually got to live on the island, which is called Mersey island, but I’ve been there a lot, but I live quite close, and so did Margery Allingham. And so that was my connection with Allingham and I’ve always lived, coincidentally, about 10 miles from where they did. So that was my answer. I knew who she was when I moved down to Allingham country, where I’ve lived now for a long time, more than 40 years. And so I was always interested, and I became a member of the Margery Allingham Society, and it was at a meeting of that society in 2010 I think, and I was giving a talk about something or other. And somebody mentioned in passing the third young man, Carter novel. And I said there were three now, who knew? Because I didn’t. I read the two that he’d written, and they said, Yes, he’d started a third novel and then died, and it had been left to the Margery Allingham Society in the will of Margery Allingham’s sister. So I said, Can I have a look at it? And has anybody ever tried to finish it? And they said, Well, this Albert Campion book was a bit of a mess, and it was like three, four chapters and no plots, no plan, nothing their characters or anything. But I was intrigued, because the opening chapter was set in from the description I knew the place, the town in Suffolk called Lavenham, which I knew very well and recognized immediately. And so I thought, Well, as I know that, I can see where he was going with one or two things, and as I’ll have a go. And that became Mr. Campion’s Farewell. The farewell bit being that he was going to retire from being a detective because, as because he was getting well, he would be 68 or 69 by then. But farewell means nothing in publishing. And another 11 books follow. But anyway, I had great fun doing it, and wrote it as if it was set in the late 1960s when Albert Campion would have been 60-69, to and but it was initially I was doing as a one off, but before it was published, the. Publisher, the man who owned the publishing company, said to me, who was a great Allingham fan, said, What’s the next one? I said, Well, I’ve just retired him. And I said, but you haven’t killed him, so that’s okay. Let’s do another. So Mr. Campion’s Fox followed that, and then the rest followed after that. But I said Mr. Campion’s Christmas will be the last one, because I think 12 is enough, and to do more than Margery Allingham did would be incredibly rude. And I can’t do anything with the character, because he’s not mine. I can’t kill him off. She did her best, she got her at least, she married him off. So I’ve inherited a family as well to carry on with, but so I became, by default, the continuation author of Youngman Carter. Technically, I’m continuing the works of Margery’s husband rather than her. But the difference I found with the two he wrote two and a half he wrote. The one difference between them and Margery Allingham’s books is he wasn’t funny and Margery was very witty funny, and so I tried to put the funny back. I hope that’s what I’ve done.

Sarah Harrison  11:29

You succeeded.

Carolyn Daughters  11:32

For sure. And it was really fun seeing all of these characters in in the 1960s and seeing where Albert Campion has grown and where he is in his life, in his marriage, his adult son is now of college age. He goes to college, I believe, at Harvard Business School. Lugg is still in his life, thankfully, “Maggers,” I guess, as Lady Amanda calls him.

Mike Ripley  12:04

Do you know why Campion’s son had to go to an American university? Because Margery Allingham’s books were always published first in America. That’s just the way her American publisher treated her better than her British publisher. She was much more popular in America than in this country, and still is.

Sarah Harrison  12:29

I did want to ask you about that, because from our perspective, I would say she, she’s not as well-known as some of the other authors, like Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, right?

Carolyn Daughters  12:41

But even a Dorothy Sayers or a Ngaio Marsh for me until so we’re our book club and podcast tea tonic and toxin is focused on the history of mystery. And so we’re, we’re Sarah and I are coming to a lot of these books, and authors fresh and new. And so, you know, we’ve made our way from the 30s into the early 40s. And Allingham was not a familiar name to me, whereas Ngaio Marsh was Dorothy Sayers was and I’m thrilled that we have read her and come across her.

Sarah Harrison  13:14

I love Traitor’s Purse. But I was wondering, is she still very well read in England? Is she still really well known there?

Mike Ripley  13:25

No, I’m afraid. Oh, no, no. Love to say yes, but being honest, no,

Sarah Harrison  13:32

Well, that’s really interesting. We had in a different book club, we read a book that’s like, not known at all here, the Tale of Genji, but it’s still read by every high schooler in Japan, as I understand it. So I was wondering.

Mike Ripley  13:49

Possibly the one Albert Campion book that she’s most famous for is Tiger in the Smoke, which is a classic. And so that’s known, but in the main she’s not there. I mean, people with taste appreciate her and are great fans. But she’s not nowhere near as well-known as Agatha Christie. And Dorothy L. Sayers is sort of waning now. She had a comeback phase in the 70s and 80s, but Ngaio Marsh has never really been that well known here. I don’t think she’s always been the most junior of the queens of crime.

Sarah Harrison  14:44

Interesting.

Carolyn Daughters  14:46

A New Zealand outcast.

Mike Ripley  14:53

Have you read many of the men of the Golden Age. Anthony Berkeley Cox? Very good. Try him.

Sarah Harrison  15:09

Okay, I’m gonna write that down.

Carolyn Daughters  15:13

We will get to Tiger in the Smoke later. Because it’s public, I can’t remember the year in which it’s published. It’s 5252 so it we are a year or two away from getting to the 1950s we are. We are slowly, gently making our way through time. That book also is an outlier, I think, in her canon of books. I’ve not read it yet, but from what I understand, she went in a different direction with the bad actor in that book, and with the role of Albert Campion being minimized in that book.

Mike Ripley  15:54

That’s true, and it’s not funny at all. I mean, it’s deadly serious. The tiger in the smoke is a psychopath. I mean, he’s a real bad ass seriously, a knife wielding psychopath. And there’s, there’s a lot of Allingham traits, there’s the fog, the fact that London is almost like a character in the book. And the plot is a bit skew, iffy at times, but it’s the atmosphere the thing. And I described it once by saying, it’s, it was obviously, it was written in 1951 and for 1951 it’s absolutely a photograph of London life. It was not accurate for 1949 and by 1953 it was out of date. But for 1951 it was pinpoint, absolute spot on snapshot of London life, and that’s partly why it’s great. And the fog or the smoke of London is almost like a character in itself in the book.

Carolyn Daughters  17:07

Kind of like a Dickens’ Bleak House.

Mike Ripley  17:14

It’s though you could one of the other later ones hide my eyes. Is also a bit Bleak House-ish as well, but it is a classic. It is very, very good, but it marked a watershed for her, because that’s the one people remember, although I was introduced to her, what second or third and third books, which were thrillers. I mean, they’re very much treasure hunts. They’re not detective stories, things like mystery mile and sweet danger, everything except pirate ships. I love them. And that’s where you got lug mag as Fontaine lug coming into his own, and I kept him going. Because the remarkable thing about Albert Campion, as opposed to Lord Peter Wimsey or Hercule Poirot, is that Campion got older. He was born in 1900 and by 1930 he was at one age by traitors purse, he was older and wiser, a little bit wiser by tiger in the smoke. He was starting to slow down, but still quite clever by the time I got to him, he’s in his 60s, but he’s still sharp. But she said herself that he was getting too old to do the running, jumping, shooting stuff. So get other people to do that whilst he worked out how to defeat the bad guys. But he was unique. He aged with the century. Hercule Poirot was a retired Belgian police inspector when he started, okay, 1920 so he was 67 then by the time he solved his last case, he was 124 but it didn’t matter with Agatha Christie, because he was timeless. The books are timeless. You don’t read them as social history, really. You can read Margery Allingham for social history.

Carolyn Daughters  19:22

To pick up the mantle, to have this character in 12 books that you’ve written. I mean, that’s living with a character quite a lot. What is it about Albert Campion that speaks to you, that you that you came back to 12 times, and felt like this is an enduring character. This is a character I want to spend time with, and that readers want to spend time with.

Mike Ripley  19:50

There was a very good friend of mine called Sarah Cordwell, who was a crime writer, who sadly died when she was two. 60, our great loss, but she described the detective, hero of very well-known crime writer, P.D. James. The detective was Adam Dalgleish, who was also a poet, supposedly, and Sarah once described as he might be a brilliant detective and he might be a really good poet, but could you face being stuck in a bus queue in the rain next to him for half an hour? No, he’d drive you mad. And I always took that as great advice, because Campion is the bloke you could be stuck in a bus queue in the rain next to and have a good conversation with or in the bar of a pub and either the posh bar or the public bar playing darts, because he can fit in either way, either one. He is literally friends with lords and possibly related to royalty, but he can play darts in the public bar with burglars and police constables. Lord Peter Wimsey couldn’t really do that. He’d be good in a gentleman’s club, but he couldn’t cut it with the hoi polloi. But Campion could, and he’s basically a nice guy, and his heart is in the right place, and it has some it’s not just Albert Campion, of course. I mean, you have an entire cast. His wife, Amanda, is a brilliant character to play with. Lugg is superb. You couldn’t make him up. He’s great. All you have to do is point him at things, and he comes, gives the goods. So it’s a great ensemble cast, some of the policemen as well. And I’ve been very lucky to be able to play with that cast of characters. But I love them all, and I should miss them.

Sarah Harrison  22:06

Do you think you will be able to retire? Are they going to keep calling back to you here and there?

Mike Ripley  22:10

No, I’ve already done something else. Now I’ve gone completely away, written a book where it’s crime novel about writing crime novels.

Sarah Harrison  22:28

Oh, interesting.

Mike Ripley  22:32

Comes out in September. We’ll see how that that comes. And how some books have very annoying things at the back called playlists, where these young people think you’re remotely interested in the music they’ve been listening to whilst they’ve been writing the book.

Sarah Harrison  22:57

Do you have one in this one?

Mike Ripley  23:00

No, no. In my next book coming out in September, instead of a playlist, I’ve done an appendix giving all the references to crime novels that the reader will have missed.

Sarah Harrison  23:15

Now that’s what I want. That’s what I want. I always feel like I’m missing a bunch of easter eggs like that.

Carolyn Daughters  23:23

What is the name of this book that’s coming out?

Mike Ripley  23:25

Buried Above Ground. It comes out in September.

Carolyn Daughters  23:31

I love this. So when you were writing these Albert Campion books, what Golden Age tropes did you make sure that you held on too tight, you honored. And which ones did you play with a little bit, if any?

Mike Ripley  23:49

Well, I had a bit of scope, because I was technically putting a golden age detective into the swinging 60s by the time I got to them. So that was one that how would a golden age detective react to a drug dealer? And then you actually do some research, and you find that taking cocaine in the 1930s was the second biggest sport after baseball. It was nothing was particularly new. So he wouldn’t be too shockable. That’s first thing I learned. Was he probably wouldn’t be too shocked. It would take an awful lot to shock him, plus the fact he lived through the war and he was an intelligent, sensible guy so but I mean, there are other things that would have to stay clear of technology, which was, which is why the 60s was good time to do it, and, and as you’ve seen from today, I’m pretty useless with technology. So that fitted my portfolio perfectly. The other thing as a writer, of course, is that I was asked this by an American at a crime writing convention, who said, what did I have to do to write Campion, as opposed to my original detective hero? It was called Angel. And I said, Well, I had to clean up my act quite a lot, so you had to cut out the swearing and a lot of the references and so on. But, but that was also great fun, because you could mix things. And there’s in, I think it’s in Mr. Campion’s Fox, which is set in 1970, 69-70, and Campion is at a brewery, of course, in East Anglia, and one of the delivery guys is driving out with a load of beer on and in his van he has an eight track stereo. Now this, for you young people, is what we had, a huge, cumbersome music in your car like that, and it’s playing the Rolling Stones, right? And, of course, campaign says, well, they’ll never last. What are they going to do when they’re 75 and they’re still going to be playing, and so is Albert Campion still going to be detecting, you know? So you can get in lots of gags like that, which is great, great fun, but basically you had to, I think keeping him, not shocking him, but not making him unshockable. There were certain things he was because, as Margery Allingham’s books, the last ones she wrote in the early 60s, she was obviously, clearly very worried about motorcycle gangs, which were the thing at the time. And going back further, there were things like traitors Perth, which was remarkably perceptive, because she was realized that faking the forging currency was a good way of undermining the war effort. And she could not possibly have known, because we know she started writing that book in 1939 she could not possibly have known that the Germans there was a special division of the SS that was actually running a thing called Operation Bernhardt, which was exactly what Margery predicted, printing fake five pound notes. I’ve seen some. They’re now in a museum local. That’s wild. But she couldn’t have known that, because that was not allowed release to the public until after the war ended. So she was just making a very astute guess being a good crime writer.

Carolyn Daughters  28:05

A good creative writer? Absolutely.

Sarah Harrison  28:08

Do you feel like and I hope this is true, but has continuing the Campion character continued to generate interest in Allingham and sort of reviving her works?

Mike Ripley  28:23

Oh, I hope so. I got a nasty feeling though, that probably more people remember my Albert Campion than hers now living people that which I don’t would not want, because it’s, I’ve just borrowed the character. I’ve been very privileged. But it’s strange. There was a television series in the 90s, and why it ended, I’m not sure, because I thought it was quite good, and the constantly talk of whether that can be remade or redone. And ironically, the guy who played Campion, Peter Davison, is now exactly the right age to play my Campion.

Carolyn Daughters  29:14

I would love a comeback.

Mike Ripley  29:16

So would I. And of course, he was excellent. When I mentioned this to him, he said, what all actors say, call my agent, and so nothing else ever happened. But I don’t know whether that would ever happen. Ever happened, but certainly the Poirot have been remarkably successful on TV. Ngaio Marsh is less so, and Dorothy L Sayers hasn’t been done for quite a while right now. So I don’t know, people always reinventing things. You got the things like Knives Out there’s a modern take on things. The Golden Age. Some of the Inspector Alleyn books will stand as classics. I mean Tiger in the Smoke is an Albert Campion book that’s above and beyond. A classic is always going to be in the top 100, top 1000 crime novels ever written, sure.

Carolyn Daughters  30:21

You mentioned Anthony Berkeley Cox. Are there other Golden Age writers who we just don’t read as much now, but we should go back and try to find we should be reading their works. Who are these writers?

Mike Ripley  30:34

Well, Anthony Berkeley Cox, who is also known as Francis Iles.

Carolyn Daughters  30:40

We’ve read him.

Sarah Harrison  30:44

Yes, we did.

Mike Ripley  30:45

And Dr. Bickleigh in Malice Aforethought tells you whodunit. Chapter one, line one.

Carolyn Daughters  30:53

That was awesome. It’s a how more of a howdunit, I guess.

Mike Ripley  30:59

I used to use that as an example. And I used to teach a class called Creative Crime Writing, and that was the classic example. Way it tells you who done it the first line of chapter one, and then, if you skip to the back, you will see that the guy gets is hung for murder, but it wasn’t the murder you think, yes, that was convicted for a murder he couldn’t have committed because he was too busy murdering somebody else. Brilliant, yes, but he did a follow up called before the fact, which was filmed by Hitchcock with Cary Grant and somebody. It’s not a famous Hitchcock, but it’s quite well known, but they had to change the ending, but it’s basically a woman. It’s all done from a woman’s point of view. And a woman get falls in love with this pretty caddish sort who’s after her money, and she knows this, and she knows he’s gonna probably kill her, and she lets him what? It’s really weird. And of course, in the Hitchcock movie, even Hitchcock wouldn’t go that far. He changed it. There’s a happy ending. Can’t remember what the what the movie’s called, but anyway, of course Margery Allingham and the Albert Campion novels are very good. And certainly Anthony Berkeley Cox is very good. And there’s chap whom I like, although they’re more thrillers than detective stories, called Philip McDonald, who actually went to live in America and wrote for Hollywood for quite a while in the 30s and but his books are fantastic amount of pace, and the early ones were crime novels. C.S. Forester, the man who wrote the Hornblower books right his first three novels were detective stories where, again, like Anthony Berkeley Cox, he tells you who did it straight away. They’re the earliest examples I found, if you like British noir writing, which everybody thinks is American, and Dashiell Hammett in the 20s and thirties and Jim Johnson, sure. But the early C.S. Forester, is good, very good. And there are lots of others. I’m just rereading Edmund Crispin at the moment, after the Second World War.

Sarah Harrison  33:56

We’re gonna get to him, I believe, later this year. Which one are you reading?

Mike Ripley  34:04

I’m reading the Case of Gilded Fly. His first one, which I’ve never actually read, but my favorite book by Edmund Crispin is The Moving Toyshop.

Sarah Harrison  34:14

We have that on the list.

Mike Ripley  34:15

That’s good. That’s very good. If you like Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion books, you’ll enjoy Edmund Crispin.

Carolyn Daughters  34:19

Just a random question that has nothing to do with anything, but you are wearing a Florence t-shirt, and I believe the clock in your house is Venice. So tell us about Italy. What’s going on in Italy?

Mike Ripley  34:42

I don’t know if you can see with the camera. They know the map on the wall. Ah, that’s Venice.

Carolyn Daughters  34:55

Venice. So you go to Italy. Special, love of Italy.

Mike Ripley  35:00

Every year we go anyhow.

Carolyn Daughters  35:05

And have you said any books in Italy, or thought about setting books?

Mike Ripley  35:10

No, no, I haven’t. Actually, that’s a thought. No, I’ll leave that I have some very good friends who are Italian crime writers, and I’ve made for over the years, and no funny, I go and we go to Italy. I take one book and I never finish it because there’s too much else to do. So, but we’re going this September. We’re going to place we’ve never been before, so that’ll be quite fun. The Italian Riviera in Terre cinque or Cinque Terre, and up in the mountains above Florence. Amazing.

Carolyn Daughters  36:04

That’s amazing, Sarah. I know you had another question about Allingham, and I have a couple more questions generally.

Sarah Harrison  36:12

I just wanted to get, for our listeners and myself, the general timeline, because this feels like an unusual situation, right? She’s writing her Albert Campion novels. And then I hadn’t realized that Youngman Carter, her husband, took over and wrote a couple when she died. Was he already a writer? And then, and then you took over. So her characters have transferred multiple

Mike Ripley  36:42

There’s a bit of a gap. Margery Allingham died in 1966, and Youngman Carter died in 1969 but he had been primarily a journalist and short story writer, and I’ve even edited a collection of his short stories. He was quite good short story writer, tending towards the Gothic, slightly supernatural things, but again, no sense of humor, and it was all said that he cooperated with Margery, certainly on the very early books, he did have an input, and I think Margery Allingham would have liked him to have more of an input, but he had other interests, shall we say. And then he was away in the war for a long time, about six years of his way. And then he came back from serving in the army, and he became a magazine editor in London. So he was into magazines and journalism. So yes, he was a writer, but he just didn’t do novels. He did a lot of travel writing as well, and was great wine writer too. And so eventually, but as he all said, he done quite a lot of the work with the plotting. And there are bits in the any, any of the early Albert Campion books, the early Allingham books where he suddenly starts talking about architecture or art, that’s usually young man Carter. Those were his things. I think Margery just thought she’d better put a bit in to keep him happy. But so you use a logical choice to when she because she died halfway through a book called cargo of eagles, and the game was for the fans. Can you spot the place where he took over from her chapter seven, I’m pretty sure of it. But so he had to finish that one, because that was being written and when she died, and then the publishers obviously said, You finished one. Can you do it? Do another? And Margery had planned one about a Russian defector in 1967 very hot topic called the Kopeck enigma. And Kopeck being a very small Russian coin. Well, the publishers thought nobody would know what a coffin was, so they called it a farthing. So that became Mr. Campion’s Farthing. And that was told the first solo effort he did, then he did another one called Mr. Campion’s Falcon. Lina might have had slightly different title. In America, because that always happened, and then he started a third one, and then died, and I was the same age as he was when I was started writing my third Albert Campion book, and I was determined to finish it before my next birthday, because of the jinx that you do the third one and you die halfway through. So I finished that one quite quickly, so he finished, died in 1969 and the bit of the manuscript he had stayed dormant within the Margery Allingham society, if you like, until 2010, so that’s 30-40, years, and then I resurrected it.

Sarah Harrison  40:55

Do people play the same game and try and figure out where you took over in the book?

Mike Ripley  41:01

They do, but it’s fairly obvious. Is where the jokes start. That’s funny.

Carolyn Daughters  41:09

Because your writing style is so different than his.

Mike Ripley  41:16

It’s not difficult. I mean, what was slightly worrying, except for the first reviews from somebody in America said how brilliant Mike Ripley had done the opening chapters are superbly. Said, No, those weren’t, not me.

Carolyn Daughters  41:38

Well, the humor is such a key part of Allingham’s Albert Campion books that I’m glad you recaptured that.

Mike Ripley  41:51

I’m glad I was, I hope, in campaigns, Christmas in particular. So because that is very much a farce, yes, the almost quite literally French fast, and people coming in and going out, and things getting sillier. There are also lots of references to James Bond in it, as there are in the first that’s because they were in the first camp in what I did in Mr. Campion’s farewell, he sends his son and his new wife on a delayed honeymoon down to a casino on the French Riviera, amazing. And the casino manager greets them and so something like, oh, it’s very hot and sticky, smoke filled atmosphere, especially at three o’clock in the morning, which is the opening paragraph of James Bond’s Casino Royale.

Carolyn Daughters  42:53

In Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang, you trace the evolution of the British spy thriller. Why do you think it’s the golden age of the thriller? Why do you think these British authors were so present? So why did they so powerfully shape the spy genre and that mid-20th century era?

Mike Ripley  43:20

Well, the period the book covers is 1953 to 1975 but the late 50s and 60s. I mean, I always said Britain was losing an empire and becoming a third- or fourth-rate power. So the only way it could save the world was through its secret agents who just happened to be fictional. They weren’t real because the real ones were terrible. They were all traitors, like Kim Philby. But it was just a classic example of the British punching way above their weight with no justification whatsoever, and just as we would say, blagging our way through just putting a brave face on it, convincing everybody, of course, we’re British, so we know what we’re doing. You didn’t, and it seemed to work.

Sarah Harrison  44:23

Well, Mike, we are we are at time for this episode. But can you stay for another short episode to dive into Albert Campion and Mr. Campion’s Christmas a little bit?

Mike Ripley  44:32

Sure. I’ve got wine. I’m fine.

Sarah Harrison  44:36

All right. Listeners, you heard it. We’ll bring Mike back for the next episode. Go get go, get your own glass if you want to join them.

Carolyn Daughters  44:48

Yes. Listeners, get your glass.

Carolyn Daughters  45:13
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Sarah Harrison
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Carolyn Daughters
We want to thank you for joining us on our journey through the history of mystery. We absolutely adore you. Until next time, stay mysterious.