Crime at Black Dudley, The Albert Campion Mysteries

Name: Crime at Black Dudley, The Albert Campion Mysteries
Author: Margery Allingham

The first novel in Margery Allingham’s renowned series introducing the legendary aristocratic sleuth Albert Campion.

Pathologist George Abbershaw is on holiday in Suffolk attending a social weekend at the remote Black Dudley manor. His friend Wyatt Petrie has organized a party to provide some diversion for his elderly uncle. With charming young Meggie Oliphant in attendance, George hopes to win her affections. But the lighthearted gathering soon takes a dark turn as the guests are caught in a deadly game.

The group soon discovers that the house is under the control of hardened criminals, and there is a killer among them. Now trapped, George must find a way to thwart their plans while getting himself and Meggie out alive. Luckily, one of the guests is Albert Campion—a notorious party crasher with a surprisingly good knack for solving mysteries.

Margery Allingham

Margery Allingham, born in 1904 to Emily and Herbert Allingham, was an esteemed English novelist, author, and editor of Christian Globe and the New London Journal. Considered one of the four “Queens of Crime” from the golden age of detective fiction, Allingham began writing stories and plays at a young age and published her first novel, Blackkerchief Dick, at 19. She later studied drama and speech training at Regent Street Polytechnic in London. Allingham is best known for her character Albert Campion, a sleuth first introduced in The Crime of Black Dudley. Campion was featured in seventeen subsequent novels, and even more short stories. Allingham continued to write until her death on June 30, 1966.