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    The Tiger in the Smoke
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    The Tiger in the Smoke
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    The Tiger in the Smoke
    Ebook344 pages6 hours

    The Tiger in the Smoke

    By Margery Allingham

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    “The Tiger in the Smoke is a phenomenal novel.” —J. K. Rowling
     
    A fog is creeping through the weary streets of London—so too are whispers that the Tiger is back in town, undetected by the law, untroubled by morals. And the rumors are true: Jack Havoc, charismatic outlaw, knife-wielding killer, and ingenious jail-breaker, is on the loose once again.
     
    As Havoc stalks the smog-cloaked alleyways of the city, it falls to Albert Campion to hunt down the fugitive and put a stop to his rampage—before it’s too late . . .
     
    “Allingham’s work is always of the first rank.” —The New York Times
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateOct 1, 2015
    ISBN9781504048699
    Unavailable
    The Tiger in the Smoke
    Author

    Margery Allingham

    Margery Louise Allingham is ranked among the most distinguished and beloved detective fiction writers of the Golden Age alongside Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh. Allingham is J.K. Rowling's favourite Golden Age author and Agatha Christie said of Allingham that out of all the detective stories she remembers, Margery Allingham 'stands out like a shining light'. She was born in Ealing, London in 1904 to a very literary family; her parents were both writers, and her aunt ran a magazine, so it was natural that Margery too would begin writing at an early age. She wrote steadily through her school days, first in Colchester and later as a boarder at the Perse School for Girls in Cambridge, where she wrote, produced, and performed in a costume play. After her return to London in 1920 she enrolled at the Regent Street Polytechnic, where she studied drama and speech training in a successful attempt to overcome a childhood stammer. There she met Phillip Youngman Carter, who would become her husband and collaborator, designing the jackets for many of her future books. The Allingham family retained a house on Mersea Island, a few miles from Layer Breton, and it was here that Margery found the material for her first novel, the adventure story Blackkerchief Dick (1923), which was published when she was just nineteen. She went on to pen multiple novels, some of which dealt with occult themes and some with mystery, as well as writing plays and stories – her first detective story, The White Cottage Mystery, was serialized in the Daily Express in 1927. Allingham died at the age of 62, and her final novel, A Cargo of Eagles, was finished by her husband at her request and published posthumously in 1968.

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    Reviews for The Tiger in the Smoke

    4/5

    249 ratings29 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Beautiful writing, but the characters kept doing really dumb things, like teen-agers in a horror flick.
    • 1/5
      I seriously was mystified by this book... Albert was mostly absent, but his wife was involved helping their friend Meg.Meg is about to be married for the 2nd time, the first time she was a war-bride & found herself widowed... All of a sudden she is receiving photographs of her long-dead husband... photographs of him being very much alive & in the vicinity. When Meg arranges to meet him, he takes off... Meg's fiancée runs after him only to be coshed in the head & kidnapped & the man pretending to be Meg's husband murdered w/ his throat cut.During the war, Meg's husband & his band were part of a group that stormed the house once belonging to his family where spies were residing.... After killing the spies, he went back in & took some of his family's treasures & buried the most valuable....In present day, the group of men have reconvened & are working to retrieve the treasure, but someone more clever & deadly is also planning the same..... Three people in the lawyer's household are murdered, the house is ransacked.... A letter written to Meg, by her husband telling the location of the treasure is the impetus....I really thought this was long, drawn-out & boring! I also did not like the characters... I much prefer to read about Campion, himself than his friends/acquaintances.
    • 4/5
      Astonishingly beautiful prose, but not really my thing. I've always meant to read Allingham, as those in crime fiction circles speak very highly of her, and now I see why. Her writing is majestic in its beauty, her characters filled with an admittedly strange and philosophical, but nevertheless palpable inner life, and her sense of irony delightful. I'd be lying if I said I enjoyed the book overly, since it's a kind of British action noir that is not my scene (I've never been into the Hammett/James schools of crime fiction) but one can't deny the richness of the words.
    • 5/5
      Of all the Margery Allingham books I have read so far this is her tour de force. Not so much a thriller, but a moving study of the conflict between good and evil, climaxing first in a darkened church and later in a ruined garden on the coast of France. Although Albert Campion is a character his role here is a minor one. This is, like the central treasure of the story, a miraculous mystery and will leave you weeping.
    • 3/5
      A fog bound mystery, less a detective story in the sense that there is not much detection to it, certainly there are no clues for the reader to follow and make sense of; it is all too clear (unlike the foggy London streets), Jack Havoc is on the loose and bent on destruction and revenge ...This is the first Margery Allingham book I have read and apparently, from what I understand of other reviews, it is very much unlike her other 'lighter' and more 'genteel' detective fiction. Certainly this is a very dark book, a chase through the streets of London after a psychotic killer called Jack Havoc recently escaped from prison after feigning mental illness. The book starts with Meg Eginbrodde getting re-married to Geoffrey Levett after having lost her first husband in the war, however photographs of her suppsoedly dead husband have been sent to her showing him still very much alive so she turns to Albert Campion to help her determine if it really is her dead husband. I won't spoil it for you here and tell you whether it is her first husband reincarnated or not, but it is the start of a chilling and thrilling race against time with some very dangerous characters and truly underworld settings.I enjoyed this book, I really enjoyed it, there was a quickness to the description and dialogue that made you feel you were running after Havoc in Campion's shoes. But, and there is a but, I thought that often, particularly at the start, her descriptions were quite convoluted and I found myself having to try and re-trace certain passages, for that the book gets 3 stars and not 4, maybe it was me, I'm certainly going to read this again in the future to find out, there are some scenes (when Geoffrey is 'captured' is definitely one that stands out) that still stick in my mind they are written so vividly.
    • 5/5
      Unusual in that there isnt too much mystery in this story, but has more spiritual depth. Campion is one of my favorite sleuths of all time. But he didnt have to much to solve in this one. But he always brightens a page and illumines a book he's in.
    • 3/5
      The typical mummery. Thankfully, the unspeakable Lugg is absent, although there is an egregious police inspector with broad chest and brow. As is not unusual with Allingham, there is one excellent scene hidden in the smoke -- an encounter in a church between the villainous tiger of the title with a saintly old bishop who actually lives his faith.
    • 4/5
      A band of series characters - all well drawn - deal with a number of villains, including a ruthless murderer escaped from prison and bent on revenge, in the midst of a dense London fog. There's not a lot of mystery, but there is great tension. Beyond the plot, the book also sets up a tension between a materialist worldview and a sort of mystic view, and reaches and ending that can be read to validate either frame. It suffers a bit from the sense that some characters are disposable compared to others, but not too badly.
    • 4/5
      A complexly plotted police procedural set in London after the Second World War. The "smoke" is the London slang for the dense fog of the time. A first, the story is about a scam, a man claiming to be the war-lost husband of a woman about to be married. It becomes more intricate, as the scam appears to be launched by a convict who escapes, and who is unrepentant about killing, hence the "tiger". The characters are very well drawn. The inspector and the Canon Avril are memorable. It would be unfair to reveal more of the plot; the uncertainty of motive and incident as the novel progresses is key to its success
    • 4/5
      This is primarily a conventional mystery, but singular in that the villain (who is also a point of vbiew character), believes I a "science of luck" which amounts to an ability to manipulate probabilities in hi favor -up to a point, it seems to work, though he ultimately dies.
    • 4/5
      The suspense built from the middle of the book on, but I can't say this is one of my favorite Campion books. For one thing, there's very little Campion. The book feels like the odd duck in the Allingham oeuvre. Very dark in physical and emotional ways, not much humor, not much mystery. Ot was still a touching story in some ways but I wouldn't re-read it.
    • 4/5
      Excellent detective novel, featuring the magnificent Albert Campion, complete with mistaken identities, buried treasure, a cast of entertaining characters and a thick London pea-souper!
    • 5/5
      Taut, susenseful, and utterly unlike most of the novels in the Campion series so far. Regular fans may miss Campion himself, but his few appearances show him changing with the years. The main characters are unforgettable in their own right, particularly Canon Avril, whose morality is central to both structure and plot. The mystery itself is insubstantial; read instead for the Graham Greene-like meditation on virtue and vice, faith and despair. It's very 1950's. Few genre authors capture their own present as well as she does here. As an additional plus the exasperating elitism of the earlier novels has finally softened into a less off-putting moral conservatism . . . Highly recommended. This one's a classic.
    • 1/5
      What an incredibly tedious read. This book is so dated: it is not a whodunnit, but a straight forward tale of daring do. It moves along by a series of coincidences, without any attempt to hoodwink the reader into thinking that a believable plot exists. An example of the poor plot working occurs near the end when Avril, a decent man of the cloth, tells Havoc, the Mr Big of London's underworld, where to find the treasure for no better reason than to lead to the denouement when Campion, lake and Havoc could so nearly meet but, even that turns into a damp squib. This may have been a great opus in the detective fiction genre, when first published but, now it falls between all stalls: the characters are unreal, the plot is ludicrous and the thrill minimal. What a waste of a tree!
    • 4/5
      This is a wonderfully murky mystery/thriller. Meg Elginbrodde's first husband, Martin, was killed in World War II -- or so she has believed for the past five years. Now, just as she is about to be married to Gregory Levett, she begins receiving photographs that, though unclear, seem to show her first husband alive and well. She turns to family friend Albert Campion to help unravel this mystery.The atmosphere in this novel is absolutely bang-on; it's so creepy and evocative, with the London fog insinuating itself into every cranny of the plot. As in many of the later Allingham novels, Campion does not play as active a role as he has previously (he IS getting older, after all), but this is still extremely enjoyable, and Allingham's descriptions of her characters remain some of the most evocative I've read.
    • 3/5
      I must say that I was a bit underwhelmed with this story. I know, I know, a LOT of people have written that this was one of Allingham's finest. Truthfully, I read these books because I enjoy the character of Albert Campion, and I enjoy watching him go after the bad guys. However, here, he's somewhat incidental and I didn't like it as much as I've liked other books in the series. The bad guy in the story was portrayed quite well, but everyone else just sort of fell flat. I do recommend it if you're reading the series, but read them in order and for heaven's sake, do NOT start with this one! It's not Allingham's best, and if you had no clue about Campion, you wouldn't gain anything from starting with this book. I hate dissing one of Allingham's books, but this one (imho) just didn't do it for me.
    • 5/5
      Meg believes her first husband was killed in the war. So why, weeks before her wedding, is she receiving photographs of him in the mail? Campion steps in to help. This books has some terrifying moments that really grip you by the throat. Great ending.
    • 3/5
      Not much of a mystery here. More of a thriller but with very little suspense. Aside from an early mistaken identity mystery, Campion does little in this one and exhibits no deductive reasoning.
    • 4/5
      The Smoke" is London, England. Meg Elginbrooke asks Albert Campion to investigate: she keeps receiving photographs that look like her husband, declared missing in the Great War and believed dead five years before. Is he alive? Or is someone imitating him and if so, why? The action culminates in a hunt for a treasure in France. Margery Allingham creates picturesque characters but, in my opinion, she can't make them plausible.
    • 2/5
      Great title but otherwise just old-fashioned without quite making it to classic. Some nice phrasing here and there but a story line that is hard to follow mainly because the narrative point of view keeps shifting, i.e. no central character. Quaintly class-ridden 1950s, with much concern about accents; bad boys all have bad accents, while the arch bad-hat has an accent that shifts between proper and not quite proper. Rejoices in the nom-de-guerre of Havoc and the real name of Johnny Cash. Really messes up towards the end when he stabs a chap in a church but chap recovers; then knife breaks when he tries to open a treasure-concealing statue with it. All rather contrived and inconclusive.
    • 4/5
      This is a terrific book with extremely vivid and particular characters and an absolutely palpable atmosphere of menace as a dangerous man stalks through islands of brightly lit places isolated and disconnected from one another by the encroaching fog. Whew. The woman could write all right.
    • 4/5
      London, post WW II, consumed by fog. Foggier still is why someone would impersonate Meg Elginbrodde's husband, presumed killed during war five years earlier. Or is he still alive and wishes to prevent Meg's approaching wedding to millionaire Geoffrey Levett.
      What begins as a knotty problem whose solution depends on a cartoonish detective named Luke, gains in sympathetic characters like Meg's father, the Canon Avril who says:
      Mourning is not forgetting. It is an undoing. Every minute
      tie has to be untied and something permanent and valuable
      recovered and assimilated from the knot. The end is gain,
      of course. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall
      be made strong, in fact. But the process is like
      all other human births, painful and long and dangerous.

      The central character is a psychopathic serial killer, and there is a band of freaks who live underground, literally. This is a novel of its time when England was emerging from the war victorious but cleansed of its feeling of indominability.
    • 4/5
      This is a dark, dank, hard-edged book, and with it, Allingham completes her transformation from a simple mystery-adventure writer to a social commentator and psychoanalyst. There are occasional criticisms that her characters are too big and broad, but that just gives them room to breathe; they feel far more alive than any of those written by Agatha Christie, for example. Here, we've got Chief Inspecotr Luke, a moral man stuck in an immoral world; Canon Avril, Campion's uncle, whose saintly outlook is both a benefit and a curse; and Jack Havoc (what a name!), who can really only be called by a couple of very modern terms: serial killer and psychopath. They all get their moments in the spotlight, and their actions play out against a harsh backdrop of drippy, wet, smoggy, post-war London. The Folio Society edition looks almost tobacco-stained, with each of the illustrations cast in sickly brown and yellow tones, and that only adds to the effect. This isn't a nice place. This isn't a nice story. There is no "mystery-adventure" here. The one element that really feels out of place is Albert Campion, and it's pretty telling that while he's present for most of the investigation, he has almost no impact on its outcome. I'm guessing that Allingham wasn't brazen enough to borrow Christie's late-stage technique (where Hercule Poirot would barely cameo at the beginning and end of several novels); she felt she needed to give the public their due if the book had "A Campion mystery!" emblazoned across the front. He really doesn't add anything, though, and Allingham's disinterest is obvious; there's a wide-open invitation to involve him in the book's denouement, and she skirts straight around it.It's hard to say that I liked The Tiger in the Smoke. It's not an inviting book, and much of it is permeated by a sense that something awful is about to happen. It is, however, a very skillful piece of writing, all the more astonishing if you have any sense at all of where Allingham was twenty-five years earlier. This is a grown-up thriller for grown-up readers. And there are a couple of places, in particular, where it will make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck.
    • 2/5
      Strangely moralizing and a lot to follow.
    • 4/5
      Nothing like an old favorite to reignite the reading habit. I found this on my dusty old mystery shelf and couldn't resist. Something about Allingham's characters grabs me. I love that much of the story is told through the actions of the criminals, and that the settings, in the worst of the days of the London fogs, are so evocative.
    • 4/5
      A young woman receives a series of photographs—snapshots of a man who looks exactly like her first husband. An investigation turns up something much darker and more sinister than anyone could have expected, and secrets from the past come to light. Most dangerous of all is a mad serial killer on the loose with everything to lose, called Jack Havoc.The Tiger in the Smoke is the first Albert Campion book I’ve read, having first heard about it in a list of great 20th century mysteries. Maybe it wasn’t the best book to start with, as Campion isn’t a central figure in this book and there’s not much character development of the regulars. But nonetheless I enjoyed this taut, slightly grim story of the chase of a homicidal maniac, loose on the streets on postwar Europe. It’s a highly suspenseful novel; I especially enjoyed the scene in the empty house. There’s also a wonderfully intriguing cast of characters, including an albino and a dwarf. But the “character,” if you could call it that, is the November fog, which pervades everything. This is a highly effective mystery; suspenseful, as I’ve said. I’ll definitely be reading more by Margery Allingham in the future.
    • 5/5
      Is the mysterious man in the photograph really the late Major Elginbrodde, believed killed in the war? How is he connected to the knife-wielding escaped convict terrorising fog-bound London? And just where has Mrs Elginbrodde's fiancé gone? This mystery is tense and atmospheric. No, strike that. It's very tense and very atmospheric. It's impossible to say much without giving away parts of the plot, but this really is a classic mystery and it unfolds magnificently. Allingham's timing is superb, and the prose is excellent. Campion is rather in the background in this story, which means that it stands alone well for those who don't want to read the whole series.
    • 5/5
      One of the finest studies of the emptiness the doer of evil, the pure opportunist, is left with I have seen in this genre of writing. The human fog, the infinite shades of grey that comes from our animality enshrined in an infinite variety of different cultural layers is delineated by the tiger, the pure immoral animal that shows up from time to time amongst us. The one that sees through the fog, through the mix of altruistic and egoistical motives that prompt actions in most people, and chooses to use his clear sight, his ability to think and see, to his own benefit, only. This human tiger is further portrayed by the likewise clearsighted canon Avril, who shows that even death is to be preferred to life outside humanity, to the existence in the opportunistic emptiness that surrounds and threatens life inside the fragile human frames of moral law. It is a masterful chilling depiction of the dehumanizing process the murderer that leaves all morality behind goes through. Paradoxically, the murderer´s fall from humanity makes him the main sufferer, the one to be most pitied. That Allingham makes us, the ordinary reader, not only understand Canon Avril´s point of view, but in fact embrace it before we understand, lies in the strength of her writing, her ability to strip naked what choices we have. The people the murderer kills, had a life to loose, and we feel for them, for the loss, their´ and their families´. But it is minor to the the killer´s loss, for he is a living dead, in the end, a hollow shell, a human form without any shade of the moral fogginess that make us all human. What Allingham says in this book - without being moralistic - is, that if we loose our moral code all together, we do not have anything of human worth left to loose. And then we really are to be pitied.
    • 4/5
      It's hard to all this a mystery because there's really no mystery beyond a couple of minor facts. It's more a thriller.This appears to be one of the later volumes in the Campion series, which I didn't know when I read it. I enjoyed it nonetheless. It's hard to put my finger on exactly why but I think it's that, even though the plot was a bit weak, the characters seemed rather vivid. The exception is Campion, himself…perhaps Allingham expected him to be well-known to the reader by this point.I'll continue with this series, but try to find something a bit earlier to get a sense of the main character.