Books in The Albert Campion Mysteries series

In Hide My Eyes, private detective Albert Campion finds himself hunting down a serial killer in London’s theatreland.A spate of murders leaves him with only two baffling clues: a left-hand glove and a lizard-skin letter-case. These minimal clues and a series of perculiar events sets Campion on a race against time that takes him from an odd museum of curiosities hidden in a quiet corner of London to a scrapyard in the East End.Allingham shows her dark edge in Hide My Eyes and evokes the sights, sounds, and inimitable atmosphere of fifties London.

Seven people might have murdered Eric Crowther, the mysterious recluse who lived in the gaunt house whose shadow fell across the White Cottage. Seven people had good cause. It was not lack of evidence that sent Detective Chief Inspector Challenor and his son Jerry half across Europe to unravel a chaos of clues. The White Cottage Mystery was Margery Allingham's first detective story, published initially as a newspaper serial. Margery Allingham was born in Ealing, London in 1904 to a family immersed in literature. Her first novel, Blackkerchief Dick, was published in 1923 when she was 19. Her first work of detective fiction was a serialized story published by the Daily Express in 1927. Entitled The White Cottage Mystery, it contained atypical themes for a woman writer of the era. Her breakthrough occurred in 1929 with the publication of The Crime at Black Dudley. This introduced Albert Campion, albeit originally as a minor character. He returned in Mystery Mile, thanks in part to pressure from her American publishers, much taken with the character. Campion proved so successful that Allingham made him the centrepiece of another 17 novels and over 20 short stories, continuing into the 1960s.