Meg Elginbrodde has just received a couple of photographs of her husband, supposedly taken quite recently, in London. Nothing so very unusual about that, you might say, but it's a bit unexpected in this particular case as Martin Elginbrodde's last known location was understood to have been scattered over a wide area somewhere in France during World War II.
So what's happened? Have his discorporated remains been re-assembled in a vat somewhere? Well, it's not really that sort of novel, so no. Have rumours of his death been exaggerated? Well, maybe, but if so there are some pressing questions, most notably: where's he been for the past several years? And where does this leave Meg's current fiancé, Geoffrey Levett?
Meg is a sensible girl, so she realises this is probably someone faking seeing, or even being, Martin for some reason; but why? Fortunately she just happens to be the cousin of the famous amateur sleuth Albert Campion, who in turn has lots of contacts in the police, so she is easily able to gather a posse of people to help her out when the time comes to meet the mysterious photo-sender to find out what he wants.
The whole rendezvous doesn't really go as planned; while Campion and his Met sidekick Chief Inspector Luke want her to engage discreetly with her contact and allow them to get a good look at him, she instead spots him (still looking like her husband) from across a railway station concourse, shouts at him and causes him to scarper. An odd thing for him to do if he was actually Martin Elginbrodde, you might say, and you'd be right, as once he's been collared it turns out he's a known wrong 'un called Duds Morrison wearing a false moustache, and, more bizarrely, a distinctive old jacket that really did used to belong to Martin.
So how did Duds get hold of the jacket? And what did he hope to gain by impersonating Martin? Well, he isn't telling during the brief period the police can hold him before having to release him (wearing a false 'tache not technically being a crime), and he isn't telling in a more permanent way shortly afterwards as he turns up bludgeoned to death in an alleyway.
So what's going on? Who offed Duds? How did he come by the jacket? What's Geoffrey - who seems to have disappeared - up to? How is old Mrs. Cash, who has connections to Meg's family but also seems to be a bit of a shady character on the quiet, involved in all this? And what's going on with the motley band of musicians who parade around the town in military uniforms and seem to have been in suspicious proximity to the scene of Duds' murder?
Well, the answer to the Geoffrey question is that he was with Duds when he died, having chased him down the alley in a bid to get some information out of him about the whole Martin Elginbrodde thing. That meant that he got in the way of Duds' assailants - the Army band - and therefore had to be kidnapped to ensure he couldn't identify any of them, so he's been trussed up like a turkey in their basement hideout while they try and work out what to do next.
The point of all this, it turns out, is that the band all served together in the army, along with Martin Elginbrodde, and took part in a shady black-ops mission somewhere in France to rub out a couple of key enemy agents. The actual rubbing out was done by Jack Havoc, another ex-army colleague and a bit of a dab hand with the old killing. Moreover, Havoc has just escaped from prison after they foolishly entrusted him to a psychiatrist for an evaluation, whereupon he killed him and exited via the window (probably a bit like this). The band are aware that there is some treasure to be retrieved from the house in France where the mission took place, but only Havoc knows the details, and even he doesn't know some key facts.
Sure enough Jack Havoc arrives in the hideout, takes charge of the group and reveals some more details - the nature and location of the treasure were known to Martin Elginbrodde, and he made arrangements to have the information passed to Meg in the event of his death and her getting married again. The actual information resides in some documents which Martin wrote and which Jack means to get his hands on before Meg does the deed. Needless to say Geoffrey, at this point, realises he's in a lot of trouble.
Meanwhile Albert Campion's finely-tuned detectival instincts have led him to smell a rat regarding the Army band and to arrange to pay a call (with the police in tow) to their lodgings, a basement under a shop. They don't have any sort of warrant or any reason to detain the band, who soon make themselves scarce, but a snoop around soon reveals Geoffrey Levett, bound and gagged in a corner.
Good news for Geoffrey, but Jack Havoc remains at large, and fiercely focused on getting to the treasure. Meanwhile Martin's document comes to light - guarded by an old friend of the family until what he deemed to be the right moment to hand it over - and Geoffrey, Campion, Campion's wife Amanda, and Meg, now in possession of the treasure's location, head off to France to find it.
So, all's well that ends well, then? Well, not quite, as Jack Havoc is still at large, and as well as being a bit stabby is also a shrewd and resourceful guy. Meg's father, Canon Avril, has his number, though, and has twigged that he is in fact old Mrs. Cash's no-good son and a childhood acquaintance of Meg's. Fat lot of good that does him, though, as Jack administers a (for once, non-fatal) stabbing, extracts the location of the treasure and heads off to rustle up a boat to take him across the Channel, with Chief Inspector Luke in hot pursuit. And so the scene is set for all parties to converge on the abandoned clifftop house where the treasure is secreted, and to discover what it is, who's going to get to go home with it, and who isn't going to get to go home at all.
The Tiger In The Smoke is actually the first of the "couple of slim paperbacks" I coyly alluded to here after I picked them up from the shelves in the Acton Trussell village hall. I'd vaguely heard of Margery Allingham before, and I was vaguely aware that there'd been a TV series based on the Campion series, starring ex-Dr Who Peter Davison as Campion. That series adapted eight of the eighteen books in the series that were published during Allingham's lifetime, but didn't include The Tiger In The Smoke (the fourteenth in the series, published in 1952). In many ways, despite it being highly-regarded by many, this isn't that surprising, as a) it's not really an orthodox whodunit and b) Campion himself is a very peripheral character in it. That said, he does provide the single most significant moment of deduction in the whole book, i.e. the realisation that the Army band are the people responsible for Duds' death, a realisation that almost certainly saves Geoffrey Levett's life.
The chapters set in the underground lair while the gang try to work out what to do next and await Jack Havoc's arrival are genuinely thrilling, and there is a significant dissipation of tension when the police come calling and Geoffrey is rescued. This is a good 60-plus pages from the end of the book, though, and at this point the story changes into a somewhat different kind of story as the main characters zoom off to France for a treasure hunt. This is all fine, but structurally it's a bit odd, and Jack Havoc's eventual (apparent) demise is a bit unsatisfactory - basically he's very tired after all his nefarious activities and rather disappointed at the nature of the treasure (i.e. nothing he can nick and sell on for a fortune) and so he slinks off down a drainage ditch to avoid the police and eventually jumps off a cliff. Um, what?
Anyway, it's all good fun and has some sly humour and some atmospheric descriptions of post-war, pre-Clean Air Act London interwoven with all the robbing and murdering. Jack Havoc is an intriguing villain, and Allingham is a much better writer of prose than some of her crime-writing contemporaries (Agatha Christie, for instance). As an aside it's interesting to note that the country legend of the same name didn't release his first records until 1955, and so this short paragraph wouldn't have seemed as oddly jarring as it does now.
The Tiger In The Smoke was made into a film, Tiger In The Smoke, in 1956. The Wikipedia page says that the film omits the "principal character" of Albert Campion, but actually, as I said above, he's not really that crucial to the plot at all. It is also the second book in this series to have a title of the form The X In The Y, the other being The Catcher In The Rye.
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