Death of a Ghost by Margery Allingham


 Albert Campion continues to be my favorite of the detectives featured in the various series authored by the "Queens of Crime." One reason for this is that Allingham doesn't take him too seriously. She seems, for example, happy to show him, as she does in Death of a Ghost, outsmarted by the villain who, distasteful as he is, is more of a genius than Campion. Indeed, it is only thanks to the intervention of the actual police that Campion avoids being murdered by this miscreant.

The events of the novel occur in the art world, and that's a world that's always ripe for the satirical eye of an observer like Allingham. Hard-boiled mysteries, I have argued, are the great realist fiction of our time. Decades ago, Allingham, along with the other Queens of Crime, had her characters move, for the most part, through a more genteel world than the one inhabited by freelancing private-eyes, but her portraits of the characters who inhabit that world seem as true as those painted on the mean streets of this or that metropolis.

And it is for he characters and the settings so skillfully described that we return to these books—even when we don't care who done it. 

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