Mr Campion's War

Starred review from April 13, 2015
Having successfully completed an unfinished manuscript by Margery Allingham’s husband (2014’s Mr. Campion’s Farewell), Ripley presents a fully original story, set in the 1960s, which paves the way for further focus on Rupert, the engaging grown son of Allingham’s series sleuth, Albert Campion. At a diplomatic reception in London, Albert is approached by Aage Westergaard, the Danish ambassador, who’s concerned about the well-being of his 18-year-old daughter, Vibeke, who’s been working as an au pair in the Suffolk town of Gapton. Westergaard is uneasy about her boyfriend, Frank Tate, and asks Albert to keep an eye on him, surveillance that Albert delegates to Rupert. Rupert observes little that’s unusual, apart from Tate’s habit of dashing into pubs for just a minute or two. The favor becomes more complicated when Vibeke disappears and a corpse turns up in Gapton with the back of its head smashed in. Ripley maintains a light touch in the service of an intricate mystery that will please Allingham devotees and newcomers alike.

Starred review from October 15, 2018
It's Albert Campion's seventieth birthday, and he's planned a big celebration at London's posh Dorchester Hotel. The guest list is eclectic: his family, of course, but also guests from France and Spain, a former German officer, a London police inspector, and representatives from the armed services and MI6. Campion's plan is to finally tell his family and friends what he did in WWII?something so clandestine that the Official Secrets Act prevented him from revealing it until now, nearly 30 years later. In a series of flashbacks, Campion shows that he was, in fact, a war hero in Vichy France and a very different person from the gentle, eccentric, seemingly bumbling man he now often seems to be. But all these years later, there is one unresolved issue that could result in Campion's birthday celebration ending in tragedy. Can he find a way to avert a fiasco? Ripley has more than capably taken over the Albert Campion mystery series, originally created by Margery Allingham during the Golden Age of British crime fiction, and has continued to publish the same kind of wonderfully genteel, appealingly old-fashioned, gently humorous, always entertaining, and eminently readable stories that became Allingham's signature.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

Starred review from October 1, 2018
Ripley has never been better at demonstrating his ability to plausibly extrapolate from Margery Allingham’s Campion novels than in his fourth outing for her gentleman sleuth (after 2017’s Mr. Campion’s Abdication). On May 20, 1970, a black-tie dinner is held at the Dorchester hotel in London, to celebrate Albert Campion’s 70th birthday. The guests include L.C. Corkran, a retired British intelligence officer, and German Robert von Ringer, a contemporary of Campion’s at Cambridge University, intriguingly described as someone who, during WWII, tried to kill the birthday boy at least twice. Flash back to 1942 and a Nazi plot to manipulate Britain’s currency, as well as a conspiracy involving “corrupt Vichy politicians making personal profits out of government supply contracts, and the well-established Marseilles underworld.” The espionage plot line predominates, but there’s an act of violence at the Dorchester whose perpetrator must be detected. Ripley matches his faithful characterizations with witty prose (a major has a “rather plummy voice, rather like a northern rep actor trying to do Shakespeare at short notice”). Allingham aficionados will be enthralled.

October 1, 2018
A posh party to celebrate Albert Campion's 70th birthday offers the occasion for the guest of honor to reminisce at length about his hush-hush service during World War II.Even Campion recognizes that he's not the obvious choice to get smuggled into occupied France for reasons to be disclosed later. But his department head, L.C. "Elsie" Corkran, presses him to accept the mission, and soon he's gamely attempting to establish his bona fides as Canadian diplomat Jean-Baptiste Hamelin. Unimpressed, a pair of thugs working for Marseilles gang leader Paul Pirani waylay him and begin to beat him up until he's rescued by his contact, Freiherr Robert von Ringer, the enigmatic German agent who asked the Brits for cooperation. The target is Nathan Lunel, a Jewish banker who was involved in an extensive web of currency transfers before he was arrested and sent to the concentration camp at Les Milles. The task is to get custody of Lunel's detailed financial records. The big questions are (1) how Campion, even carrying the credentials of Ringer warehouseman Didier Ducret, will ever be able to infiltrate the camp so that he can negotiate with Lunel, and (2) why Robert wants to betray his country and work with the English in the first place. The first of these turns out to not be a serious problem, and the second is eventually brushed aside so that Ripley (Mr Campion's Abdication, 2017, etc.) can concentrate on what really interests him: an attack on one of Campion's birthday guests, many of whom turn out to have close ties to the story he's telling, by another with the knife that should have been reserved for cutting the cake.A rum brew alternating between arch 1970 chatter and the hero's melodramatic first-person account of his wartime adventures that, despite an unexpected attack of birthday-party violence, never quite jells.

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