More Work for the Undertaker by Margery Allingham
When I did my post on fortune-telling
Can you Predict which Books I will Feature? - Fortune Tellers
- blogfriend Lucy had suggestions, including Margery Allingham’s More Work for the Undertaker. It’s a while since I’d last read it, but I had no memory of fortune-telling featuring. When I re-read, I found that it is most certainly there, and plays an important role in the plot, but it is very late on in the book – I was almost giving up. But there it is:
‘That’s the gal all right. Call’s herself Pharaoh’s Daughter. She gives readings for a tanner a time and we never bothered her under the Act because she seemed so harmless.’
She is also referred to as Psychic Phoeb.
And so – oh joy – I can use a great favourite picture: The
Pythoness, who is actually the Pharaoh’s Daughter from the story of Joseph in
the Bible.
Pauline
Frederick - Potiphar's wife (LOC) | Bain News Servic… | Flickr
However - I didn’t enjoy this book nearly as much as I was expecting, or perhaps as much as it deserved. It had so many features that I normally love, such as poison pen letters. There are the Palinodes, a weird family: see recent posts such as this one
Falling in Love with the Whole Family
– the usual thing that I
found them appalling and psychopathic, not charming and eccentric. ‘Campion was aware that she realized that she was being very
naughty…’ is the kind of off-putting remark I object to. I am not charmed by
entitled privileged people who don’t do a hand’s turn, waste their money, and
are rude and unpleasant to others.They have their own language: ‘Im doing a
Cawnthorpe’. How hilarious.
There is the ex-showgirl Renee, who also featured in
Dancers in Mourning by Margery Allingham
a book that I recently enjoyed hugely, moving
it up the list. She ran a theatrical boarding-house in that book, and has changed into a different kind of landlady, in a way
that is glancingly explained early on, a bit more detail later, but none of it
really convincing.
The events take place around Apron St, one of those corners
of London that Allingham describes so beautifully, making them real. Here the
small shops are trying to recover after the War, and the poshos’ house faces
the titular undertakers.
All this worked so well in another book more than 10 years
later – many of the same tropes but much more readable
The
China Governess by Margery Allingham
I got lost in the middle of this one with all the tradesmen and the
lodgers and the hideous Palinodes. Lugg was – as always – a treat whenever he appeared.
Then it picked up towards the end. There is a small party, like a literary salon, late on, and it’s a pity there wasn’t more of that. Here’s Lugg with the canapes: ‘the old girl persuaded me to ‘and around. She see at once that I could do it.’
The very creepy idea of ‘Going up Apron St’ and why people were scared about it, was hardly surprising in its explanation, but gave us a frisson. The long-drawn-out section chasing the coffin-brake (horse-drawn hearse) through the streets of London late at night, followed by an equally-extended delay while we wait for the coffin to be opened, was terrific. Allingham was in her element with this.
There was a young woman who wore very old-fashioned clothes
at home while having a taste for other styles:
She was in all her glory. A skin-tight bodice revealed the charm of her young bosom. Amightly skirt spread out in exaggerated folds. A spotted scarf made her look like a dressed-up kitten, and a modern boater sat squarely and fashionably on her newly-dressed hair.
Charlie Luke surveyed her.
‘I tell you what,’ he said at last. ‘Take off the scarf and I’ll take you to the pictures Sunday.’
Will anything come of it?
Ah well…. We know.
And the book ends excellently – with a telling letter from
the otherwise absent Amanda.
I couldn't find all the features of the young woman's outfit in one photo, so I combined them.
I am with you, Moira, there are enough 'entitled privileged people in real life without being expected to be amused by them between the pages of a book. However I do seem to remember enjoying this more than you did. Such a great title and she is so good at the sinister and macabre. Chrissie
ReplyDeleteYes, she is so good at that: perhaps it just caught me on a bad day. I looked up the last time I read it, and my notes say I very much enjoyed it, and found it funny. Which was not true this time....
DeleteIs the depiction of the Palinodes supposed to be satirical? Possible sending up Bloomsbury remnants ? I'm not sure. When I was once in the doldrums a friend lent me More work for the undertaker and I was hooked on Allingham. This is isn't her best book and I couldn't choose which one is because her range and the way her writing changes over the years but it is gripping and the sense of menace masquerading as the everyday is chilling. Plus, Magersfontein Lugg of course.
ReplyDeleteLugg was a sparkling joy! When I first read Allingham as a teenager I didn't quite get the point of him, but in my advanced years, he is the highlight of the books, I always want more of him.
DeleteMaybe I was having a off day when I did this reread!
I found this rather fun - I liked the variation on the usual disclaimer, which says that every character is "A careful portrait of a living person, who has expressed himself delighted not only with the accuracy but with the clarity of the delineation. Any resemblance to any unconsulted person is therefore accidental."
ReplyDeleteI also found Jas Bowels an appropriate brother-in-law for Lugg, and the explanation for the young woman's eccentric outfit also amused me.
It is strongly hinted that there was another murder, which no one had any great desire to prove was not an accident. Perhaps an example of looser morality after the war, which made Kind Hearts and Coronets a comedy rather than a crime film and allowed an ambiguous ending (at least in the UK).
On eccentric families, I found the Palinodes less annoying than the Lampreys (not a high bar). That's even allowing for the fact that, when I last read Surfeit of Lampreys, I half-convinced myself that we weren't meant to like 80% of the family, and that Roberta saw them more clearly than when she first met them in New Zealand.
Your line on eccentric families sums it up perfectly!
DeleteInteresting idea that black comedy became more accpetable after the war.
I think I have to put this book away for now, and pick it up again in a couple of years and see if it works better for me.