Books: Farewell to Campion

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CARGO OF EAGLES by Margery Ailingham. 233 pages. Morrow. $4.95.

When England's Margery Allingham died last year at 62, her fans mourned the fact that she took the great detective Albert Campion with her. Actually, the diffident, gentlemanly unraveler of Miss Allingham's mysteries survived his creator briefly. In her posthumous Cargo of Eagles, he pulls all the disparate pieces together for the last time. He will be missed.

Right to the end, plump, kindly Miss Allingham kept her scene fresh and her characters contemporary. In this one, a seedy village on a saltwater marsh near London leaps uncomfortably to life as the English counterparts of California's Hell's Angels come roaring in on their motorcycles to help jam the gears of a tricky plot. Almost languidly, Campion shows up just often enough to see through the ways of evil, to bait and set the trap for the malefactors.

At Margery Allingham's death, the London Times ranked her with Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie. Those encomiums may start arguments among the cognoscenti, but all can join in praising her forthright approach to her trade: "In the old days writers just worried about finding a novel way to kill the victim. I think now writers have found out that the best way to kill somebody is to hit him over the head with a blunt instrument." For her purposes, as in Cargo of Eagles, the murder was an offstage happening, merely a cue for Albert Campion's fine mind to go to work.

Miss Allingham's death again raises the question why so many of the great mystery writers are women. Perhaps the endless war between the sexes has taught women the necessary patience, ingenuity—and the knowledge that the guilty are transparently devious.