Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
So, Jonty, obviously the question of the hour. You grew up in London. Were you ever there in a pea soup fog?
I do remember the fogs of my childhood being much, much thicker than they were as I got older.
Chapter 2: What is the significance of fog in 'The Tiger in the Smoke'?
And that's because of the various clean air acts that were brought into London. So I do remember mornings in my childhood and days where the fog was very, very dense and you couldn't see far ahead. What about you, Sophie? Because you were in London last night, weren't you? And was there a pea soupa?
There wasn't a pea soup, but my God, there was a lot of, there was some serious tiger in the smoke action, Jonty. So many people smoking.
What, smoking actual cigarettes?
Actual cigarettes. Fags are back, Jonty.
That is so 1990s.
Oh my God, you have no idea. As you know, I've been doing a grand tour of what turned out to be the great smoking sites of Europe. And my goodness, smoking is back in a big way.
You heard it here first, folks. This is The Secret Life of Books. I am John T. Claypole, criminal who's been put away in prison during the Second World War and managed to escape only to find the world is not as it was when I was put behind bars.
And I'm Sophie Gee, incredibly glamorous, compelling, dynamic, irresistible.
That goes without saying, Sophie.
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Chapter 3: How does Margery Allingham's writing evolve in this novel?
That's an amazing passage, isn't it?
It's the debut of Jack Havoc. It's the moment he finally appears halfway through the book.
It's the appearance of the psychopath.
And it is pure film noir. Well, in fact, it's Jack Nicholson in The Shining with Daddy's Home. I love the way that he sort of descends into the room and then says, Dad's back.
It's incredibly creepy. And yeah, you're right. You can really see Jack Nicholson doing it, can't you? In fact, Jack Nicholson is Jack Havoc. All right. So let's get into a kind of some backstory about Marjorie Allingham.
So both her parents were genre writers. She's sort of Pulp Fiction royalty.
She's a Pulp Fiction nepo baby.
Her father, Herbert Allingham, wrote public school fiction, which was a genre in the late 19th century and actually through the 20th century.
Yeah, I love public school fiction.
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Chapter 4: What themes connect 'The Tiger in the Smoke' to post-war London?
And you can imagine this character with his receding chin and effete aristocratic voice hopping about trying to do the Charleston.
Oh, I love that. Absolutely. Jossie loves an albino because Titty Doll is albino.
So his role in the book is really just there as a joke about whimsy. But the book is picked up by American publishers as well as Brits. And the American publishers say to her, forget Abishaw. Look, what the market wants is more aristocratic gentleman sleuths, Campion is your man instead. Absolutely.
It was the sort of Hugh Grant moment, wasn't it? Ahead of its time. You know, he's a sort of, he's already making a joke about the sort of Hugh Grant type character in Four Weddings and a Funeral.
And so she's stuck with a Campion and she does very well through the 1930s. and 1940s, very much in the mode of Dorothy L Sayers and Nioh Marsh. Except I think what makes her books different is she always plays a bit fast and loose with the rules of the detection club in the 1930s, where the crime writers came together.
And although she was a member of the detection club, she was a slightly distanced one. So sometimes Campion stories aren't quite traditional 1930s golden age sleuth stories. Sometimes he's a bit of an adventurer as well. So she's always kind of slightly to one side of the of the genre.
Yeah, she completely is. And, you know, she's really overtly playing with the Christie model and the Marsh model by writing these kind of cozy stories. A lot of the early writing has that quality of the sort of very enclosed, sort of jolly, cheery local community that's kind of disrupted by a crime. It's got that kind of disordered world waiting to be kind of brought back into order.
So she really picks up and to some extent sort of plays with
the rules of the game that had been set up by by these other writers but always there's this edge of sort of menace and sort of simmering the simmering possibility of the darkness not being resolved is the way i would put it and i think that that's it's a subtle change but it's it becomes really important when we get to the tiger in the smoke because in that book
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Chapter 5: Who are the main characters and what roles do they play?
She's delightful. She's charming. She is, of course, herself. aristocratic, which is always good. So we've had this kind of pre-gaming with her because she's quite a lot younger than Campion. He meets her in the novel Sweet Danger. There's this strange scene where Campion tries to marry her. But she's very young. And so he agrees to wait until she's ready to be his.
And so we kind of hold off for the marriage to take place. And it's not until the fashion in shrouds where she's 24. So I think something like my math is quite weak, but I think seven years have passed. And she is a member of an aeronautics team with the look of a Botticelli angel and Campion, who is 38, and they finally can come together.
So I think she's, you know, this is a kind of riff on the Peter Wimsey story with Harriet Vane. So we can see that there's a lot of kind of cross-pollination between these writers. And it makes it all the more pronounced when we get to Tiger in the Smoke that she's doing something really different.
Yes, let's get into Tiger in the Smoke. So all the writers we've been talking about, Sophie, are kind of fundamentally altered by the Second World War. That period of golden age fiction, although it continues till after the war, it's kind of unsettled and reoriented from it. So Dorothy L. Sayers, as we looked at in the first episodes of this series, basically stopped writing to crime fiction.
She didn't think it was appropriate anymore. She thought that in a world which had become a battle between good and evil, her responsibility as a writer was to lean into Christianity and religion and become a force for good. Agatha Christie sort of sticks to her formula. But as we saw, a murder is announced is just every element is describing a society that's been completely derailed by the war.
And what Christie does, which is so brilliant, is she manages to take this changed world and and fit it into her normal formula. Allingham does something very different. She feels that the world has changed and she starts to ask herself, what is crime fiction going to be now? What is going to make crime fiction relevant?
And so she in The Tiger in the Smoke starts to move away from kind of traditional models and modes of crime fiction and is starting to develop something quite new.
She really is. So let's have a little flavour of the opening of Tiger in the Smoke. I'm going to read you a passage, Jonti. Fog everywhere. Fog up the river where it flows among green eights and meadows. Fog down the river where it rolls defiled among the tears of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great and dirty city.
Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish Heights, fog creeping into the cabooses of Collier Briggs, fog lying out on the yards, hovering in the rigging of great ships. That is not Tiger in the Smoke. What was that the opening of? Bleak House, Dickens' Bleak House. Okay, so now compare and contrast. The fog had crept into the taxi where it crouched, panting in a traffic jam. Great sentence.
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