Campion. Oh, so, so, lovely. I have now read Sweet Danger, and am entirely entranced by the wonderfulness. Allingham is thoroughly at the Sayers end of the detective fiction spectrum, where the point is to write a proper clever witty book with fabulous people in it, which also happens to be a detective story (unlike Christie - spit spit - who can't even write decent mysteries since the denouement always relies on information you couldn't have known, and whose characterisation is shockingly lazy. He is...Belgian! She is...young and wears red lipstick! Mhmm). She also included a character called Stukely-Wivenhoe, which is the sort of thing that makes me very pleased indeed. And Campion describes himself as a 'Universal Uncle and deputy adventurer', which makes me want to give him a hug (and does nothing whatsoever to separate him in my mind from His Beigeness).

Am now on The Fashion in Shrouds, which, by pure coincidence, follows on with a certain character from Sweet Danger. More than that, it takes place 8 years later, and the change in him, and in the tone of the novel, is so marked it's heartbreaking. I had this lovely theory about detective fiction (like many other clearly-defined 'lowbrow' genres) relying on being static, because it was comforting to know that at the end you would surface in the same place, and the detective would solve the case, and thus there is order to the universe. Even Lord Peter and Harriet develop only in the sense of getting married, after all. But this...the whole plot revolves around someone knowing him well enough to exploit his weaknesses, and the whole point of Campion is that he doesn't exist: he's a fantasy in his own head, playing silly games, and suddenly someone is forcing him to engage in some self-examination, to admit he's now 38 and instead of it being all jolly scrapes and a bit of a lark, it's life, and he's getting a little long in the tooth for daft pseudonyms and secrets. And it's the late 1930s, and everyone's so much more brittle, so much more knowing, than even ten years before. It's all so sad.

Back before he was emo 1930s-style, however, there was The Case of the Late Pig, what I watched on the telly with that nice Mr Davison. The entire plot revolves around gingerness. It's like someone out there is making telly just for me!

There must and shall be icons, and I shall make it so, but to facilitate such things I did cap, quite frenziedly. (This time using VLC, bless it, so they are nice .pngs and not shite bitmaps, hurrah.) 40ish caps under the cut: it's only polite to share, after all. (NB: photobucket is being typically infuriating, so lots of them are wee. If you want a biggerer version of any of them, email me, and I shall furnish you with the Peteyness.)

( hatporn! )

Feel free to snag them and make pretty pictures. Or just look at the hats for a bit. Whatever.