Exit Mr. Campion

By * Martha Duffy

MR. CAMPION'S QUARRY by Youngman Carter. 237 pages. Morrow. $5.95.

Somerset Maugham once observed that historians of the future--with whom he confidently identified--may find more to admire in contemporary mystery stories than in purely literary works. Unlike serious novelists, mystery writers must tell a good story and are judged principally on how they tell it. The suspense novel, as Maugham pointed out, should be short, inventive and cleanly written, unencumbered by purple passages or digressions. The detective should be an agreeable and intriguing character --perhaps an eccentric, but never a cartoon. Few writers would pass Maugham's test more handsomely than the late Margery Allingham, who, along with Dame Agatha Christie and the late Dorothy Sayers, dominated a golden age of suspense that began in England after World War I. Her aristocratic sleuth, Mr. Albert Campion, survived four decades, 20 books and dozens of malefactors before his creator died in 1966. Even then, he did not retire immediately. Allingham's plots are full of Lazaruses. Taking that as his cue, the author's husband, Philip Youngman Carter, revived Mr. Campion for two more books until he too died in December 1969. Mr. Campion's Quarry is his final effort.

Miss Allingham's strength --and her husband's--is clear, serviceable prose, less careless than Agatha Christie's and less precious than Dorothy Sayers'. It must be said, though, that Mr. Campion began life in The Black Dudley Murder (1928) in unblushing imitation of Sayers' rococo creation, Lord Peter Wimsey. Both were lean, languid young noblemen who spoke in the high whine that Waugh classified as the British upper class baying for broken glass. Both concealed great skill and cunning behind a facade of graceful, gratuitous vagueness.

Lord Peter expired after a mere eleven novels, smothered by the author's love for her creation. But Allingham took a critical look at her man. By Death of a Ghost (1934), Campion had dropped his drawl and the pose of an amateur adventurer and become a professional detective. He acquired a wife and child and a manservant, who had been a cat burglar until he put on weight.

No small part of the Allingham charm is her chariness with detail. Where Sayers gorges the reader with information about Lord Peter's mulish family and elegant tastes, Allingham drops only a few facts per book. In Police at the Funeral, for instance, the reader learns that Mr. Campion loathes and suppresses his Christian name, Rudolph, which makes it all the more astonishing to discover--eleven books later--that he has called his own son Rupert. Gradually, too, as the series progresses, a caste of semiregulars assembles: the policemen Gates and Luke, the trouble-prone Faraday clan, Sister Val. Perhaps the apogee of Campion's career occurred early in World War II in one of the best episodes, Traitor's Purse. He is called upon to save his embattled country from a massive, ruinous counterfeiting scheme, and he does--despite the fact that throughout the book he has amnesia induced by a blow on the head.

Campion aged at a favorable rate --30 years for 40. He also kept in touch with changing times. His last adventure finds him still trim at 60, helping an old friend sort out an egregious instance of industrial espionage. Despite the hero's fitness, Mr. Campion's Quarry is an autumnal book. His wife, the former Lady Amanda Fitton, is in the

States pursuing her longtime interest in aircraft design. He has given up his trophy-studded digs at 17A Bottle Street off Piccadilly for a service flat furnished --alas--in MGM Modern. Both friends and foes are approaching the end of active life and know it; long pauses punctuate their conversation, as if the speakers were savoring a cherished and disused ritual.

Mr. Campion led a coherent and selective life. But compared with his creator's, it was downright chaotic. Margery Allingham was born in Essex, the child of a couple who wrote popular fiction for a living. When she was seven, her father gave her a study of her own and the plot of a fairy tale--and instructions to rewrite it in as many ways as possible. Margery had other ideas, and shortly produced her first mystery under the pen name of "Potassium Cyanide." It concerned the death of her governess.

She seemed never to lose either that precocity or a clear-eyed control of her destiny. A totally retiring woman, she once wrote: "All my life has been spent in the same place, a comparatively small area of London and the coast. I have been married to the same man since I was 23, and was engaged to him when I was 17. I have lived for 30 years in the house I knew well as a girl." Her first book was published in 1921, when she was 17--with a jacket designed by another 17-year-old, Youngman Carter. They fell in love and married in 1927, the year she dreamed up Mr. Campion. Campion soon made them comfortable enough to settle on the edge of the Essex salt marshes in a house surrounded by orchards and formal gardens. Margery Allingham thrived in this background of tweed, tracker dogs and luncheon parties. A large, loud-voiced woman with gusty enthusiasms and a love of 1920s slang, she avoided interviews, lectures and all the public aspects of authorship.

English literature boasts many imaginative women who achieved fame while leading circumscribed lives--Mrs. Gaskell, Jane Austen, the Brontes. But, as Margery Allingham once said proudly, "To have achieved it on the east coast of England in the years from 1904 on is something of a feat in itself." Eras are harder to kill than cats. Lay one pompously to rest and it will be found stretched out someplace else. Yet the rich fictional genre of the English gentleman-detective seems as near to its close as Miss Allingham's way of life. There will be no more Mr. Campions.

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