Cocktail Talk: Coroner’s Pidgin
Hey, look at this, a Cocktail Talk post from an author I’ve never featured before! That’s cause for a drink. Hold on. Okay, I’m back, with drink in right hand as I type with the left. Anyway, I haven’t read all the Margery Allingham Albert Campion books, just a handful. Most of them, pretty solid (admittedly, I got into them first by watching the late-eighties British teevee show based on them, starring the charming Peter Davison, and so now I picture him as I read the books, which is pretty swell), though she slips into a boring-in-today’s-light classicism too often, and an awful casually-racist-in-any-light moment once or twice. Skip the books that hit the latter, and try to forgive the former. But this particular book, Coroner’s Pidgin (published as Pearls Before Swine in the US), set during WW II, has the time period, which is interesting, a good mystery, Campion at his best, and the below quote, which is quite apropos:
He paused for his announcement to have the right effect. Nothing so forceful as a dramatic effect, but one in which just the right element of surprise and interest was as carefully blended as in, say, a very good Highland whisky.
– Margery Allingham, Coroner’s Pidgin
