The Tiger in the Smoke.

My writeup of Saturday’s A’s-Rays trade is up for Insiders.

J.K. Rowling told fellow crime writer Val McDermid in a public interview last summer that she loved “golden age” crime novels, and specifically cited Margery Allingham’s The Tiger in the Smoke as a favorite, calling it “a phenomenal novel.” The fourteenth of Allingham’s novels starring investigator Albert Campion, Tiger has very little in common with the detective novels of other Queens of Crime like Agatha Christia and Dorothy Sayers, focusing more on the criminal than on the detective.

Campion is barely in the book at all, which starts out covering the peculiar case of a young widow, Meg, related to Campion, who is about to remarry but who has received several blurry photographs that appear to show her dead husband alive and walking the streets of London. That investigation resolves itself rather quickly, but opens up on to the “tiger” of the book’s title, a violent psychopath who escaped from prison and is after a supposed treasure left on the coast of France at the house of the widow’s fiancé. From that point, the focus of the novel shifts from Campion to the criminal, Jack Havoc, whose background is something of a mystery but whose manipulative character and force of personality dominate the final half of the book.

That change of focus means this isn’t a detective novel in any real sense of the term; Campion is so ancillary to the main plot that the film version of The Tiger in the Smoke dispensed with him entirely, handing his few lines to Inspector Luke or other characters. This makes for an excellent character study, as Allingham delves into Havoc’s background, motivations (beyond mere greed), and desperation, but not much of a crime novel, with a heavy-handed, forced conclusion that relies on a series of coincidences to put Havoc alone with the widow at the site of the treasure even as a multinational police force is closing in. Once Havoc is on the run, having joined and then largely left behind the criminal gang to which his co-conspirator in the original deception belonged, his character is less at issue and we’re left with a more conventional chase narrative.

Which brings to me to my key question: What is it that Rowling finds so compelling about this book? The prose is highly descriptive, which is a hallmark of Rowling’s style as well, and I have a feeling that Allingham’s use of “Wotcher!” inspired the same term in Rowling’s Nymphadora Tonks. (I also wondered if the offhand reference to a “Joe Muggles” in Three Men in a Boat may have helped give rise to the term “muggle,” which Rowling has said she derived from the English word “mug,” meaning a fool or a gullible person.) But there’s no sense of mystery in Tiger, no building narrative towards a climax of plot or action; I never once thought that Meg would die at the end of the book, and the only real question was whether Havoc would die (and how) or be captured. Once we’ve had a window into his personality – delusional with persecution mania, perhaps, with abandonment issues and a sociopathic willingness to manipulate others for his own ends – even that seemed to answer itself. It’s genre fiction that dispenses entirely with the conventions of its genre, but does so without fully compensating for the absence of the typical elements of detective fiction – the mystery of the killer’s identity, the process by which the detective solves the case, or both – with something else.

Next up: I’m almost finished with The End of the Battle, the final book of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, a farcical sequence based on his own experiences in World War II. It’s currently just $2 for Kindle, but you’d have to read the prior two volumes for it to make much sense.