Only the most pleasant characters in this book are portraits of living people and the events here recorded unfortunately never took place. The Tiger in the Smoke is not a plot-driven, easy-read detective story, as enjoyable as a cup of tea in an armchair by the fire, and slipping down just as pleasantly.
It is very different, and far more serious. But those are almost asides to this dark and often frightening book. There are brutal, even gratuitous murders, by hideous knifing and beating, and we learn fairly quickly who committed them. But this is not a whodunit, it is a why-dunnit, a complex novel of character. It is also, at its core, about the essential Biblical, and specifically, the Miltonian, conflict between good and evil: the devil in the shape of Jack Havoc, and an angel, the saintly Canon Avril.
There are not many crime novels more genuinely frightening and fewer that can be read and re-read without boredom. You know who did it, why and how, and you could not be less interested in finding out all over again.
One of the marks of a good novel of any kind, is that it yields more with each re-reading. The workings of the plot of The Tiger in the Smoke , once known are known for good and another reading simply kick-starts the memory.
It is everything else that bears the weight of several readings. Margery Allingham, like Dickens, was a London-lover, and kept a flat there even when she lived mainly in an Essex village.
Like Dickens, and many writers before and after her, she enjoyed simply walking about the city, looking, listening, taking in. She sat in tea-shops or on benches or in churchyards, and people gravitated to her and then they talked. She undoubtedly lent a sympathetic ear but the writer in her was working away all the time, storing phrases, conversations, details. London worked its way into the heart of many of her books, and especially into The Tiger in the Smoke.
Its ways and weathers, its courts and alleyways and squares and hidden side-streets, affected those who lived and worked among them, and helped to form them. Even the policemen in this thriller have their patch of London woven through them and the view they take of life and crime.
They know it back to front, as Allingham did. Only then could she weave and enmesh her book and its characters with the city in the confident way she does. Canon Avril's vicarage is warm, comfortable and comforting, an oasis of muddled and challenged but essentially happy extended family life, as well as the place where church mingles with domesticity and is the homely background to the vicar's own, slightly eccentric brand of holiness and spirituality.
And then there is the other London, where a rag-tag street band of ex-soldiers and vagrants live in a bleak cellar when they are not wandering the streets playing a cacophony of instruments and where they go in fear of their leader, the albino Tiddy Doll. The fog is sinister and frightening. And anything may happen in it and be concealed, secrets, evil deeds, swift, cunning movements.
It is more, far more, than merely a tiresome feature of winter weather in the great city. The setting is so powerful, and many of the subsidiary characters so idiosyncratic and interesting, that the central character of the villain has to make a very strong impact.
Jack Havoc stands up to everything. He is her most repellent, dangerous, evil, and unusual killer, a man with a wounding childhood, and a strange past history, without emotion or empathy or conscience, and yet not entirely without humanity, cold-blooded, shocking, brutal, and yet perhaps, just perhaps, redeemable.
Tiger in the Smoke , Pan Macmillan. Tiger in the Smoke , Penguin Random House. Borrow Listen. Download for print-disabled. Tiger in the Smoke , Agora Books. Paperback in English - New Ed edition. The tiger in the smoke , ImPress.
The tiger in the smoke , Chivers. Hardcover in English - Large Prnt edition. Thet iger in the smoke , Hogarth. The tiger in the smoke , Penguin. The tiger in the smoke , Aeonian. Tiger in the Smoke January , Manor Books. The tiger in the smoke , F. The tiger in the smoke: abridged. The tiger in the smoke: a novel. The tiger in the smoke: a novel , Doubleday. The tiger in the smoke. The tiger in the smoke, a novel Publisher unknown. Publish date unknown, Heinemann Educational.
Places England , London , London England. Classifications Library of Congress PR Classifications Library of Congress. Community Reviews 0 Feedback? Loading Related Books. Thorpe in English - Large print ed. Publish date unknown, Heinemann Educational in English
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