Albert Campion books in order

Reading order

Albert Campion made his debut in The Crime at Black Dudley (1929), initially appearing as a supporting character before taking center stage in subsequent novels. The early books have the breezy, countryside feel typical of Golden Age detective fiction, full of eccentric suspects and elaborate plots. Campion himself is deliberately hard to pin down – amiable and apparently dim, he conceals a sharp mind and hints at an aristocratic past he refuses to discuss directly.

As the series progresses across the 1930s and 40s, the tone shifts. The wartime novels Traitor’s Purse and Coroner’s Pidgin bring a darker, more urgent quality to the stories. The Tiger in the Smoke (1952) is the most celebrated entry in the series, a tense thriller set in London in which Campion plays a relatively secondary role to the terrifying central villain, Jack Havoc. Many readers and critics consider it one of the finest British crime novels of the twentieth century.

The series continued after Allingham’s death in 1966. Her husband Philip Youngman Carter completed Cargo of Eagles and wrote two further novels. Decades later, Mike Ripley began a new sequence of Campion adventures, picking up the character and his world with Mr. Campion’s Farewell in 2014 and continuing through multiple entries into the 2020s.