[These notes were made in 1988. I read the 1987 printing of the 1937 Penguin edition:]. One ends this novel with a very strong sense of shape - of a pattern satisfactorily completed. That pattern, strangely enough, has almost nothing to do with the murders in the book, or the way they were committed. Rather, it has to do with two principal characters in the book, one of whom is Allingham's detective, Albert Campion, and with the motives for their reluctance to proceed against the man they know (or think they know) is the killer. Jimmy Sutane, a music-hall dancer (with some physical resemblance to Astaire, but otherwise very English) is the charismatic centre of an odd group of people who forgather at his country house. There's his subdued wife Linda (to whom Campion is uncharacteristically and strongly attracted), his rather neglected small daughter (Sarah), and his moody younger sister Eve. (Allingham very cleverly leads us down the garden path about Eve, letting us surmise for a good part of the novel that Eve is actually Sutane's daughter). Then there's Chloe Pye, a vaudeville actress, who has been involved with Sutane in the past in some mysterious way. There's the morose and talented composer named Mercer, and an obnoxious but good-looking understudy named Konrad. To cut a long and complex story very short indeed, a quiet visit by Campion to the country house to investigate some petty attacks against Sutane is interrupted by the sudden death (possibly suicide) of Chloe Pye. A little later, Konrad is killed in an explosion; the light on his new bicycle turns out to have been rigged. As his investigation proceeds, Campion gets more and more reluctant to pursue the matter, for he believes, and we believe with him, that the dancer Sutane is behind it all, and he has a very English and gentlemanly reluctance to destroy the man whose wife he secretly covets. The twist was a genuine surprise to me: it turns out that it was Mercer, not Sutane, who a) was married to Chloe Pye in the distant past and b) committed the murders. Sutane, who had stolen Chloe Pye from Mercer in that past, protects Mercer, out of the same sort of motives which have been making Campion drag his feet on the investigation of Sutane. Eventually, of course, it all comes out, but we are less interested in the fate of Mercer than in the mental state of Campion and Sutane. The murders are really quite incidental to this murder mystery!
 - Margery Allingham)
