Mr Campion Books in Order

The Mr Campion novels form a coherent late‑career arc for Albert Campion, charting his progress from middle age into his seventies. Mike Ripley treats Campion not as a frozen Golden Age figure but as a man whose life continues well beyond the last pages of Margery Allingham’s books.

The sequence begins with Mr. Campion’s Farewell, set in the East Anglian town of Lindsay Carfax, where a pattern of strange "nine days" incidents hints at organised crime behind a picture‑postcard façade. Subsequent novels revisit Campion at different points in his life: investigating a diplomatic tangle involving a Danish ambassador’s daughter, unpicking a death at a Yorkshire boys’ school, or probing rumours of royal treasure at a Suffolk archaeological dig.

Other entries look back and forward at once. Mr Campion’s War lets the ageing detective recount a hazardous mission in occupied France during the Second World War, while later books move into the late 1960s and early 1970s, with stories set around a new university at Black Dudley, a supposedly haunted Essex village or a top‑secret aviation project in Cambridge. The final volumes bring him into the era of television adaptations, cold‑war paranoia and the very real limits of memory.

Throughout, familiar faces anchor the stories. Campion’s wife Amanda, their actor son Rupert, old ally Lugg and a trio of policemen – Oates, Yeo and Luke – all appear, sometimes centre stage and sometimes only in passing. The books pay close attention to how relationships evolve as careers wind down, children grow up and old comrades retire or die.

Ripley’s approach is to echo Allingham’s style without pastiche for its own sake. The plotting is generous and often intricate, but he is just as interested in atmosphere: East Anglian marshes, foggy London bottle clubs, windswept coastal villages and student common rooms all get time on the page. The tone slides easily between comedy and melancholy, reminding readers that this is a long life being lived, not just a string of cases.

For new readers, the Mr Campion novels offer a way into a classic detective’s world without needing to start in the 1930s. For long‑time Allingham fans, they provide the pleasure of seeing how Campion might have grown older – still courteous, still curious, and still apt to be on the spot when history and crime cross paths.