Mystery Mile is the second appearance of Albert Campion. I had read The Crime at Black Dudley a couple of weeks before, and picked up the next in Margery Allingham’s series since it was there.
The first paragraph goes like this:
“I’ll bet you fifty dollars, even money,”said the American who was sitting nearest the door in the opulent lounge of the homeward-bound Elephantine, “that that man over there is murdered within a fortnight. I’d say six weeks, only I don’t like to rob you.”
Sadly, the American and the Englishman (who takes the bet) don’t appear at the end of the book to settle up. Still, you can’t deny that it’s a hell of an opening. The Crime Club edition of 1930 that is on the Leisure Collection shelves of my employer has the quote on the title page, beneath the title and author, above the publisher, across from the Map of Mystery Mile that doesn’t seem at all useful.
I forget sometimes that our academic library has those leisure shelves. Or, rather, I don’t forget that they are there, as I irritably check them for the books that people shove any-which-way back after browsing them, but I forget that I could have (f’r’ex) checked this book out from here rather than from the public library. Not that it mattered, really, one way or the other.
This Leisure collection consists mostly of mystery and specfic novels, with a very small handful of non-genre novels considered to be of insufficient merit to be up in the Ps. And of course non-genre is a silly thing to say about any novel, but y’all know what I mean. And the distinction between Leisure reading (Mystery Mile or The Dragonbone Chair) and Litchrachoor (Lost Horizons or The Case of the Golddigger’s Purse) is largely when and how the book was acquired. Isaac Asimov’s Robots of Dawn is in Leisure, but The Complete Robot is in the stacks. Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials Mystery is in the stacks, but her Nemesis is in Leisure. I could go into my rant about genre and literature and literary careers and whatnot, but I’m really saving that up for a different Book Review later in the week. Let’s just take it as read, shall we?
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.