A Bluestocking Knits

I had a bonus book for the 1937 Club since I managed to acquire — and read! — eight instead of just seven.  The bonus is Dancers in Mourning by Margery Allingham, which I chose because the girls and I had watched and enjoyed the Peter Davison "Campion" series some years ago, and I remember them fondly.  This particular book has a similar setting to Marsh's Vintage Murder, being full of "theatricals" with the detective thrown in amongst them not particularly willingly, but while much of the action in Vintage Murder takes place in a theatre, Dancers is set at the country home of wildly-famous actor/dancer Jimmy Sutane, which is filled with fellow actors in the current hit musical and numerous hangers-on, as well as the household staff.  Sutane asks Campion to the house to find out who has been playing rather dangerous practical jokes that have brought his nerves to the breaking point, but things turn deadly when a universally-disliked has-been actress is hit and killed by Sutane's car.

I was, I suppose, already predisposed to like Campion, but he certainly comes across more warmly than Alleyn, possibly partly because Campion is generally wittier than Alleyn, but also because we are given much more of Campion's feelings than of Alleyn's — certainly in this particular novel, in which Campion, to his dismay, finds himself falling hopelessly for Sutane's wife.  Although Campion's man Lugg does not make his entrance until about midway through the book, the rapport between him and Campion, so effective in the series, is happily much in evidence here as well.

(Dancers in Mourning is available in a Canadian e-book edition here.)

Links to other readers' reviews of books published in 1937 can be found here.