Your Humble Blogger has read one or two of Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion mysteries before, but this was the first time through More Work for the Undertaker<\/I> (NY: Avon 1976).\n
It’s a fine book. It’s pretty annoying in places, and has a lot of the Englishness that will get up the noses of non-Anglophiles. It’s also not really a puzzle, in the sense that there isn’t a moment when Ellery looks at the camera and says, “You now have all the information you need figure out who the killer is.” I have gotten more used to that now; I have pretty much stopped trying to figure out the ‘answer’ when I read mysteries. That not only means that the ending is often a true surprise, but that I don’t get all disgruntled when the solution turns on a point that was never made clear (or even introduced).\n
I never figured out what was in the box. That came as a surprise. I didn’t figure out who the Guilty Party was (although looking back, the person was the obvious process-of-elimination result when you cleared out all the characters whose guilt would have been unsatisfying from a narrative point of view.\n