The Tiger in the Smoke (Albert Campion, #14)

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The Tiger in the Smoke (Albert Campion #14)

4.01 of 5 stars 4.01 · rating details · 1,209 ratings · 71 reviews

Meg's marriage to self-made millionaire Geoffrey Levett promised to be one of the season's happiest events. Until Meg began receiving photos of her late husband Martin, who had presumably been killed in WWII.

Meg called upon old friend Albert Campion to get to the bottom of things. For Campion, the case was cut and dry - until a brutal triple murder occurred.

Paperback, 224 pages

Published December 1st 2005 by Vintage (first published 1952)

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Feb 28, 2010 Bruce rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a thriller, not a detective novel, and a superb one. The holding back of one star is because I deem the thriller genre, defined as a tale focused primarily on danger and pursuit, to be inherently limited. Tiger boasts, however, a nugget of theological drama which, if it had been integrated into the fabric of the novel more thoroughly, might have raised it into the same class as Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. The killer, Jack Havoc (this is not a spoiler), follows what he calls "the s...more

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Jan 01, 2009 Patricia rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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...more

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May 12, 2013 Richard rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: detective-and-mystery

Sometime in the 1980s my local paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, published the favorite mysteries of Dilys Winn, editor of Murder Ink and Murderess Ink, which are apparently companion volumes for fans.

I used to clip the reviews of appealing new books with the intent of getting around to them — a pre-internet version of the To Be Read shelf. Like my TBR shelf here on Goodreads, that file got really thick, and most of the stuff in it was ignored and forgotten.

But I recently decided to get rid of...more Sometime in the 1980s my local paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, published the favorite mysteries of Dilys Winn, editor of Murder Ink and Murderess Ink, which are apparently companion volumes for fans.

I used to clip the reviews of appealing new books with the intent of getting around to them — a pre-internet version of the To Be Read shelf. Like my TBR shelf here on Goodreads, that file got really thick, and most of the stuff in it was ignored and forgotten.

But I recently decided to get rid of some clutter, and got around to my files. Most of the stuff in the "Reading List" file went straight into the recycling bin, but a few caught my eye. One was a report I'd apparently requested and paid for on what books were considered required reading in American secondary education. I presumably wanted to double-check my literacy, and I see that I still haven't read many of those undoubted classics. If you want to take a look at the list, I turned it into one of Goodread's Listopias here.

Anyway, this was one of the favorites listed on that faded newspaper clipping. And I'm glad I read it — it's really good. Not "literary classic" good, but a cut above most of the detective/mystery fiction I've read. It's probably been twenty years since I read any Agatha Christie, but based on vague recollections, I think I like this better. I think it has a better... er, dynamic range of personalities than I remember from Christie. Maybe not.

What really struck me was that the people that populate this foggy London just after World War II seem closer in spirit to Dicken's London than our own. Some of the sad miscreants don't seem to have any counterpart in this modern world. That gives this a peculiar feel of a world times — now that coal is no longer a common fuel, even the legendary London fogs that provide such a mood within this story have now gone.

I see from Wikipedia that the author died many decades ago, so I won't encourage you to buy a new copy of this, but see if it is available at your local library and spend a few evenings with this gem.

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Bruce Richard,
You liked my review of this novel, and I enjoyed yours. Although, I disagree that Tiger is a detective mystery comparable to Agatha Christie....more
May 12, 2013 03:28pm

Richard I note that this is the fourteenth in the series that apparently featured Campion, and I wonder if that is the source of our divergence. Since I never...more I note that this is the fourteenth in the series that apparently featured Campion, and I wonder if that is the source of our divergence. Since I never read any of the others, as far as I was aware he was actually a secondary character. The cleric and villain were much more vivid and important. Even the vigorous young detective and the engaged couple were closer to center stage.

Because I wasn't aware of the nominal focus on Campion, I was impressed by the fact that this story seemed to spread the intellectual prowess between quite a few characters. One of the great weaknesses, in my opinion, of the detective genre is that it requires too much suspension of plausibility. Either you have an unrealistically implausibly brilliant detective in something like the Holmes model, or you have a not-quite-so-brilliant detective that somehow keeps getting into case after case, each dramatic, and somehow unraveling them (perhaps more like the Sam Spade, perhaps).

The idea of an accidental team approach seemed startlingly more realistic and quite novel in my limited experience with the genre. This is what bumped it above the Agatha Christie stories or others I recall.

If one focuses on the detective that is nominally at the center of detection, then, yes, I would agree that Campion was quite bland. So I can easily imagine how someone expecting a detective-centric telling of the story would be disappointed here.

When I finished the book, and before I came to Goodreads and started learning about the rest of the series, I was wondering whether there was a sequel. I thought it more likely that any series would continue with the professional development of Charlie Luke, or maybe with the inadvertant participation in further mysteries of Canon Avril (à la Chesterton's Father Brown).

I was quite surprised to find that this was fourteenth in the series, and equally surprised to learn that the series focused on Campion.

And that, I think, might provide a clue as to why Dilys Winn put this — and not any of the thirteen earlier books in the series — onto her list of favorites. Perhaps she also appreciated the way the detection was chaotically spread around and required some contingency, instead of via the more typically presented efforts of a solo protagonist.
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May 12, 2013 05:07pm

Bruce Your comment about the weakness of the detective genre is interesting. I agree, they are quite unrealistic, but then they're meant to be romantic stor...more
May 16, 2013 06:43pm

Nov 10, 2012 awbrey rated it 2 of 5 stars

This was my first Campion novel, and it apparently was not the place to start. I found almost all of the characters tiresome and without depth, from the saccharine Meg to the sanctimonious Avril. There was constant commentary about how characters were the ancient face of evil or extremely animated while telling a story, and it would have been more satisfying to simply see the characters actually being these things. There was far too much telling, instead of showing. Luke, Doll, Geoffrey, and Hav...more

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Jul 23, 2012 Dana Stabenow rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The great thing about going to book conferences is that there you are, penned up with a bunch of other people who all love books. This time it was the Poisoned Pen Con in Phoenix, a small, intimate gathering with single-track paneling where you have time to visit and hobnob with other readers and your favorite authors.

One of my favorite authors is Francine Matthews (aka Stephanie Barron) and she and I and Barbara Peters were talking about our favorite Golden Age mysteries. They were as one in de...more

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Sep 11, 2011 Tony rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction-crime-detection

Allingham, Margery. THE TIGER IN THE SMOKE. (1952). ***.
Allingham’s hero, Albert Campion, appears in this novel, but he doesn’t have a whole lot to do. This story, supposedly one of the author’s favorites in the series, is more like a young boy’s adventure book, full of nasty thieves and freaks who have no compunction about murdering whoever gets in their way. The plot concerns a young woman who is engaged to be married. She was married before, but her husband was reported missing and presumed...more

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Feb 05, 2012 Leah rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: crime

I quite enjoyed it. It's not, as I expected, a mystery at all, but a thriller, the chase of a deadly criminal through the foggy streets of post-war London and not a few coincidences.

The fog-as-character was a bit forced, but that's possibly just because it is completely outside my frame of reference, and so I felt it was intruding on the story during its frequent mentions. I found the post-war setting fascinating, small asides about how a prisoner jailed in 1944 wouldn't understand that the figh...more

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Sep 25, 2011 F.R. rated it 3 of 5 stars

One of the genius things about crime novels is that because they’re all the same, there are limitless possibilities of what you can do with them. Yes, there’s the basic structure that the reader expects, but beyond that the author can use his or hers ‘hunt the murderer’ yarn to tackle anything they damn well like.

Take this interesting, if very flawed, Albert Campian novel. The basic set-up is that there’s a ruthless and expert killer on the loose in London; he is one of the most dangerous men in...more One of the genius things about crime novels is that because they’re all the same, there are limitless possibilities of what you can do with them. Yes, there’s the basic structure that the reader expects, but beyond that the author can use his or hers ‘hunt the murderer’ yarn to tackle anything they damn well like.

Take this interesting, if very flawed, Albert Campian novel. The basic set-up is that there’s a ruthless and expert killer on the loose in London; he is one of the most dangerous men in Britain, and Campian and Scotland Yard have to track him down before any more victims fall. And yet the murder plot is almost the least fascinated element of this book. Written in 1952 and set post-war, Allingham portrays a dark fog forever hanging over the city. Such is the depth and darkness of this fog/smog, that it becomes almost existential in nature. The characters in this book are literally unable to see what is in front of them and where they are going; they’re always fighting against the gloom and lost in this world of blackness. Without a doubt there’s a sense of post-war malaise in this fog, Britain was a country on the winning side of the war, but they don’t feel like victors in this gloomy London – instead they seem to have lost their sunshine and their joy. And perhaps even more than that, a dark and heavy fog is by its nature hugely oppressive, and this oppression is felt right across society itself. If you read the adventures of the aristocratic detective Campian which were written before the war, then there is a sense of a very ordered society. Everybody knows their place. In The Tiger in the Smoke on the other hand, that society is pushed down and crumbling. People who used to have money don’t any more, respectable persons are letting themselves down, things aren’t what they were promised to be and all is too vulnerable to the forces of disorder.

Jack Havoc – the tiger of the title – is an incredibly interesting post-war British character: a man who has tasted violence during the war, and is now unable to stop his worst impulses. He represents society’s underbelly, the poor boy who was offered charity by those better and richer than him, but still grew up to be a bad one. That war against Hitler allowed him to pick up all kind of new and violent tricks, which he can employ to get what he wants while the forces of law and order stagger along helplessly behind him. It is quite striking how often he exposes the limitations of the agents of authority, showing them up as foolish and flat-footed. And more so than say Brighton Rock’s Pinkie (a pre-war character of similar ilk), Jack Havoc is a force of incredible nature – remorseless, unrelenting and for the most part unstoppable. Certainly he is one of the most noir characters I have ever read in English fiction. There are American characters like him in the novels of Jim Thompson, or played on the screen by Robert Mitchum, but few in English fiction. He is wild and uncontrollable, a destructive force which threatens society itself.

As I said though, this is a distinctly flawed novel. Allingham would clearly rather be writing about Havoc than anyone else, so it does often feel as if the police and even Albert Campian himself have been inserted in from a different novel. It’s also a quite poorly paced story, with vaguely sketched minor characters, and plot development and twists which are casually and almost carelessly unspooled. However it is a really terrifying and evocative portrayal of London, and a must for anyone interested in the state of Britain after the war.(less)

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Oct 08, 2011 Judith rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, mystery

I found out about this book from an article in Books and Culture about God and the Detectives. Since I love a good mystery, I thought I would give this one a shot. It was hard to get into it at first, because the language is an older (more verbous) style, and the book I got from Interlibrary loan had rather small text.

But once I got into it, I was really impressed on how the plot is so beautifully written. People who initially did not seem to have anything in common ended up being woven into a...more

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Mar 08, 2010 Anne rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: mysteries

Margery Allingham was a contemporary of Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers and, as such, a member of the 'Golden Age' of detective fiction in the 20's and 30's in the UK. I have read some of Allingham's mysteries in the past and liked them, but this title disappointed or at least puzzled me. 'Tiger in the Smoke' finds Detective Albert Campion (Allingham's main detective character) tracking a vicious killer over several days through a very foggy London. The fog serves as a character in itself and...more

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May 06, 2012 Gina rated it 4 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed "Tiger in the Smoke", it was well written with plenty of description, I almost felt like I was in grimy London surrounded by fog, and breathed a sigh of relief when I looked up and remembered I was in a bright room on a comfy sofa. It is scary how the fog in London could become so thick that you really could not see where you were walking.

There are plenty of attractive characters in this story, especially the endearing Meg, practical Amanda and odd Campion. Another of my favour...more

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Mar 29, 2013 David Ebsworth rated it 4 of 5 stars

The Tiger of the title is jail-breaker and "knife artist", Jack Havoc, back to his vicious trade again on the streets of "the Smoke" - post-war London. And it's Albert Campion's job to track him down before it's too late. Here is the opening...
'It may be only blackmail,' said the man in the taxi hopefully. The fog was like a saffron blanket soaked in ice-water. It had hung over London all day and at last was beginning to descend. The sky was yellow as a duster and the rest was a granular black,...more

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Nov 07, 2010 Al rated it 3 of 5 stars

This book, set in post-WWII London, is part of Ms. Allingham's Campion series, although Campion doesn't play a big role in it. A resourceful psychopath escapes from a London prison, and tries to find the secret location of valuable property described to him by a senior officer in WWII just before that individual died. The officer's family, living in London, is in peril as Campion and the police search for the killer. The book's strengths are the characters and the classic conflict between true...more

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Dec 07, 2010 Kirsty Darbyshire added it

according to all the critics this is supposed to be margery allingham's finest hour. i didn't think it was terrible, but i did think it was a long way from the best campion i've read. the story is all about finding an escaped convict and veritable madman who goes by the unlikely name of jack havoc, he's the tiger to catch and london is, of course, the big smoke. an array of pompous characters and only a very small part for campion to play were my chief disappointments here. i have several other

...more

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Jun 03, 2012 Sheila Beaumont rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: adult-fiction, mysteries-suspense-thrillers

"The Smoke" is fogbound post-WWII London. "The Tiger" is the truly evil Jack Havoc, who has escaped from prison by feigning mental illness to get sent to a psychiatrist, whom he fools and then murders. In his quest to get hold of a priceless hidden treasure, he doesn't care how many people he kills. This thriller, one of my favorites, is notable for its graphic contrast of good, personified in the saintly Canon Avril (protagonist Albert Campion's uncle), and evil, personified in Havoc. There's a...more

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Sep 25, 2012 Andrea rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 1900s-1950s-era, amateur-detective, british, mystery, havedeadtree

Meg Elginbrodde, a war widow for five years, is on the verge of being remarried when she starts receiving grainy contemporary photos of a man who looks very like her dead husband. Campion, a relation of Meg's, steps in to try to discover whether this is an impersonation, blackmail, or if, by some strange chance, her husband is still alive.

The blood-soaked unravelling of the mystery, which becomes a character study of a killer, is gripping, but this is not one of my favourite of the Campion novel...more

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Feb 20, 2011 Dan rated it 2 of 5 stars

Starts strong but stumbles about two thirds of the way through until it sags into a flabby and insipid conclusion. By the end I was hoping out of spite that the murderer would take care of a few more of the characters, maybe even all of them. Though he himself was one of the biggest disappointments: he was billed as a sort of Keyser Soze manque, but when he finally makes his appearance he just can't live up to the hype. Oh well. I think there's just something about the style of Golden Age myster...more

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May 16, 2011 Abbey rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: myst-cosies, myst-pi, series, vintage, myst-fems-project, myst-set-andor-auth-uk

BOTTOM LINE: #15 Albert Campion, gentleman detective, then-current day London, WW2 France. A dark cosy that seems terribly similar to several of her 1930s books, especially GYRTH CHALICE, which was far better IMO. Does feature a theme that was, at the time, quite shocking.

An escaped convict, a serial killer, is loose in a London fog, and has ties that lead him to a sweet young thing, her fiance, and Campion. Albert is awfully “null” in this, though, neither doing any “derring do”, nor solving an...more

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Sep 10, 2012 Jz rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: mystery, own, rereader, favorites

14th in series. 1952.

This is Margery Allingham at her very best.

She's written 13 Albert Campion mysteries leading up to this one, and it was worth the wait.

Character development was paramount in this book. Not of Campion or his wife, Amanda, or Lugg, but I think it was presumed that you were familiar with them by this time.

No, it was the five main characters, Charlie Luke, Meg Elginbrodde, Geoffrey Levett, Canon Avril, and Jack Havock, that made the book. Their interlocking lives were intertwi...more

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Mar 20, 2008 Magdalene rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book really surprised me. I've been reading mysteries all my life but had never heard of it. While browsing the internet for "best of" mystery lists, I found it on no fewer than 3 lists by very different readers (I found very few overlapping books). It was written in the early 50's by a British woman author and is dated in a number of ways, but the humor is dry and surprisingly fresh, the characters vary from the usual stock personalities, and the plot diverts sharply from the traditional t...more

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Sep 09, 2012 Grouchy Editor rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

British mystery novelist Allingham is less interested in clever plot twists than in her characters, which is both good and bad. Good, because she’s created an unusually strong villain, the knife-wielding, tortured-soul Jack Havoc (a.k.a. “Johnny Cash” –- I kid you not), but bad because her heroes are a bland bunch. Whenever the action shifts to the story’s quartet of lovebirds, I was reminded of those old Marx Brothers movies –- pure genius whenever the boys were on screen, but barely tolerable...more

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Aug 03, 2011 Donna rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: golden-age-mysteries

This is often considered one of Allingham's best. I enjoyed it very much. Again, I'm a bit behind in series arc of character development, so sometimes that is confusing, but this book can be read without having read the others without too much difficulty. World War II solidering comes into play. Also what does one do when one's presumably dead husband suddenly seems to be alive...and you're engaged to be married shortly?

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Sep 26, 2011 John rated it 3 of 5 stars

Oddly written mystery – thriller written in the contemporary period during the time of the “pea souper” smogs in London.
A young widow thinks she is involved in a blackmail attempt by a scammer pretending to be her former husband killed in the War.
A violent offender escapes from custody and this becomes involved with the case, with a genteel middle class fmaily and a bunch of peniless war veterans.

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Aug 12, 2012 John Bellamy rated it 4 of 5 stars

As noted by some reviewers, this is not really a mystery or detective novel. More of a suspenseful police procedural, it rises well above the usual merits of the genre with its vivid characterizations and the unexpected inclusion of the sort of theological encounter you would rather expect from one of G. K. Chesterton's Fathe Brown stories.

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Apr 26, 2013 Annie rated it 5 of 5 stars

Have finished this for at least the third time, if not fourth or fifth. Allingham is comfort reading - beautifully phrased, delightful humour, good plots and always the right ending. She knows when to stop.

this applies to all her Albert Campion books - wish I hadn't given away my Penguin collection, the library has so few.

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Mar 09, 2013 Mary Stevens rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: crime

Post WWII London with its impenetrable fog. The tiger is a truly evil man who is bent on finding a treasure he heard about during the War. Allingham's sleuth, Campion, does not play a big role. The real hero is his friend the elderly Canon Avril. A rich cast of characters, many likeable. Hard to say more without giving away the plot.

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Jun 20, 2008 Kirsten rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: own, fiction

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 i...more

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Mar 08, 2008 Nancy Oakes rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: uk-crime-fiction-and-mystery, mystery

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'...more

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Aug 03, 2010 Nick rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

There are soooo many characters in this book that it was often difficult to figure out what was going on. That said, I liked that the reader is privy to the workings of both the criminals and the police and some of the victims, all as Allingham holds out on the reason for the crimes. Satisfying, if overly complicated.

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Jun 27, 2009 Carol rated it 5 of 5 stars

Really great classic mystery. Something about it reminds me of and C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength and the fiction of Charles Wallace. It's set after the close of WWII. A young war widow is engaged to be married again, and suddenly begins receiving photos that seem to indicate her first husband is still alive. An intricate mystery follows, with some great characters,suspenseful plotting, and graceful writing.

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About Margery Allingham

Margery Allingham was born in Ealing, London in 1904 to a family of writers. Her father, Herbert John Allingham, was editor of The Christian Globe and The New London Journal, while her mother wrote stories for women's magazines. Margery's aunt, Maud Hughes, also ran a magazine. Margery earned her first fee at the age of eight, for a story printed in her aunt's magazine.

Soon after Margery's birth,...more

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