Today on the continuing adventures of Conundrum Reads the Entire Campion Series Out of Order:
The Mind Readers (1965)
In an unexpected twist in format, Mr. Campion meets honest-to-goodness Cold War era science fiction in this fascinating look at spies and ESP in 1960s London. Thrills for the whole family!
Spoilers and more lie ahead!
I was frankly a little dubious when I read the description of this book. Campion has certainly dabbled in the unexplained before, but never like this. I was pleasantly surprised by this adventure - like many of Allingham’s stylistic experiments, it works largely due to the skill of the author and her eye for interesting characters. She takes to technobabble rather well, it turns out.
It saddens me to note that this was the last Campion novel Allingham ever completed; the next book in the series, Cargo of Eagles was only partially written when she passed away and was finished posthumously by her husband.
I was pleased to see Campion return to the fore in this tale, along with the delightful Lady Amanda. Their companionable marriage continues to make me smile, whenever we get to see it in action. In fact, we get a whole host of returning characters in this one - Canon Avril is back along with the other denizens of his rectory, Charlie Luke is of course involved, as well as the hilarious Thos Knapp, whose reappearance actually made me laugh out loud because it was so unexpected. Absent, but mentioned, are Mr. Lugg, who is surely enjoying retirement by now, and Rupert, whom Amanda notes is finishing up at Harvard. (I found it interesting that he didn’t attend his father’s alma mater, but since Amanda’s Aunt Hat is a New Englander, the choice of a school in America seems less strange.)
Lady Amanda’s extended family plays a fairly involved role in this adventure - the two boys caught up in the mind reading experiments are her great-nephews. Edward Longfox, 12, is the son of Hal Fitton’s daughter Sophia and her late explorer/scientist husband. Sam Ferris, 8, is the son of Mary (Fitton) Randall’s daughter Helena and her American scientist husband. The boys are about to be on school holiday and Helena plans to meet their train in London and spend the break there visiting family to avoid the dreary military research institute island that the Ferris family is stationed on. (Edward’s mother is evidently in South Africa.)
Mr. Campion is an old spook. Let us not forget that. He may have officially retired from government service at the end of the war, but one never entirely leaves that behind, does one? Especially not if you’re in the line of work he is. When someone tries to kidnap the boys at the train station and the woman who attempted it turns out to be a spy, Campion gets drawn back into the fold.
Turns out, the boys have got their hands on simple devices that can unlock innate human potential for telepathy. Martin Ferris’s institute has been researching the possibility to enable long distance communication without radio, but no one’s sure where the boys got the devices from. Martin’s boss takes them to have them analysed, but when he turns up dead and the prototypes go missing, things get heated. The search for answers nearly ends up costing Campion his life, as he finds himself alone with a killer who is much younger and fitter than the aging detective.
While I found the story engaging, it lost steam after Campion’s encounter with the killer, and the resolution leaves unanswered the questions the author asks about how society as a whole will change as a result of this discovery. While it makes perfect sense for there to be no definitive conclusions reached in the narrative, it still makes the end slightly unsatisfying in an anti-climactic way.
Quotes time:
“Officer!” said the voice, young but unmistakable in background and temper. “I wish to give this lady in charge. She is attempting to kidnap me and my cousin.”
There was a flurry before him, and Godfrey looked down to see a flash of red hair, two struggling children, and a black coat whipping round someone wearing spectacles, and then the second child broke free. He flung himself at the policeman’s solid blue legs and hung on to one of them as if it had been a tree.
“Look out!” The voice was high and shrill. “Look out. She’s a spy!”
Amanda <3:
Opposite him, in the window alcove, sat the Lady Amanda, sister to the Earl of Pontisbright and to Lady Mary, who was Helena’s mother. She was a remarkable person who had made a career for herself in the late 1930’s and 1940’s as one of the principal designers of Alandel Airplanes. Now she was still a slender woman with a heart-shaped face and clear light-brown eyes. The blazing Pontisbright hair tends to grow darker with the years, but there was still a glint of its smoldering fire in the sleek bob which hugged her round head. One of her chief charms was her voice, which had remained as young as her enthusiasm, and now when she spoke it could have belonged to a girl.
…
Amanda sat up, and her most valuable characteristic, which was an inspired vein of common sense, flowed smoothly across the tingling room.
Mr. Campion appears with Luke in tow.
The two adult newcomers were startled. Mr. Albert Campion, a thin man with pale hair and eyes and a misleadingly blank expression, shot a thoughtful glance at the youngster through his horn-rimmed spectacles and Superintendent Luke permitted himself a bewildered smile.
The device:
“What is all this? I don’t like it.” Old Avril was frowning. “What have you children got hold of? Edward, come here. Now, my boy, just the truth, if you please! Explain. Make it quite clear to us all.”
Edward capitulated wearily. “Very well, Uncle Hubert,” he said, “but I should think it might be very dangerous to show it to you, considering the people who seem to be after it.” He was pulling off his muffler as he spoke, and they stared at him as his skinny neck became revealed. His shirt was open and a piece of woolen undervest appeared across the bird ribs high on his chest. At the side of his throat there was a piece of elasticized plaster. He prized it off cautiously, and when the unattractive scrap of sticky fabric lay in his hand he held it out to them. In its center, embedded in the white adhesive, was a small silvery cylinder about half an inch long.
Amanda bent over it. “What on earth is it? It looks like some peculiar kind of transistor valve.”
Science fiction becomes reality?
“I simply don’t believe it,” said the thin man slowly. “It can’t be true.”
“Couldn’t it?” There was a streak of naïveté in Luke. It did not appear in the ordinary way, but, when utterly out of his depth, he was occasionally prepared to see wonders.
“I can’t credit it,” Mr. Campion insisted. “Why hasn’t it happened before? People have been trying to do this since civilization began.”
The superintendent was not impressed. “They said that about wireless,” he objected. “ ‘They’ll be catching crooks with it next!’ That’s what my father said when he first heard of radio.”
Charlie Luke decides to try it out:
“Now… I’ll have a minute by the clock. I’ll concentrate like hell. You time me, Campion, and send me a message. Something unlikely. Right? Off we go.”
He took up one of the patches and slapped it into place and then, closing his eyes, sat back, stiff and frowning. It seemed a very long wait. Luke remained perfectly still, but he was certainly trying; the room vibrated with his effort. Finally Mr. Campion touched him on the shoulder and he relaxed.
“Not a whisper!” His eyes flickered open and he was laughing. “I’m afraid…” The words faded on his lips and an expression of amazement appeared in his widening eyes. The next few seconds were never forgotten by the men who watched him. He had an expressive face, and they were able to see some of the agony which went on behind it. His initial surprise was followed by bewilderment, giving place to anger and then to fear as one emotion after another passed over his mask like the shadows of driving leaves flying across the sky. They saw him struggle to get hold of himself. The sweat shot out on his forehead and, as his effort increased and his knuckles grew white on the arm of the chair, it ran down his cheeks and onto his neck. Gradually his great strength of character emerged and suddenly, after less than thirty seconds, he put up his hand and tore the plaster away.
“ ’Struth!” he said.
“What happened?” Mr. Campion was looking at him in alarm, and the old canon bent forward anxiously.
The superintendent shook his head as if he had been under water.
“How long?” he demanded huskily. “Half an hour? I fainted in the end, did I?”
“The whole thing took less than half a minute.” Mr. Campion was too surprised to be tactful.
“Get away!” Luke was silent for a moment and then got up and stretched himself cautiously. “I thought I was having a stroke,” he said seriously. “I’d made up my mind there was nothing there, you see, and I relaxed and it got me.”
“What did?”
“I don’t know, quite.” He mopped his face and neck. “It was like going barmy, I suppose. I was thinking at tremendous speed, one thought chasing out the next before it had begun. Nothing was related. I was feeling everything very strongly but not for long. Then I got the wind up because I thought I was dying and I tried to get out of the chaos. It was a brain storm!” The idea seemed to comfort him. “That’s about it. What do you know! I’ve had a blessed brain storm!”
“Which cleared up miraculously the moment you pulled this bit of filth off your neck?” Mr. Campion bent to retrieve the scrap of plaster from where it lay on the carpet.
Luke turned away from it. “Put it back with the other,” he said firmly. “The-er-the negative stuff I got was quite incredible. Not at all suitable here.” He looked at Avril apologetically. “I’d have sworn I hadn’t got it in me!” His glance fell on the newspaper before him. “It was more in his class,” he added, nodding at it. “That’s about the quality. If Toller had suddenly got into my skin…?” He broke off and his brows rose. “ ’Struth!” he said again. “He’s only just heard his bad news. He could well be thinking of me! But it wasn’t only him. There was yards of stuff, hundreds of people. What about you, Campion? Were you trying to send me something? I was aware of you. You were terribly embarrassed about Prune.”
Mr. Campion gaped at him, a touch of color appearing in his thin cheeks. Luke’s love affair and the short-lived marriage which had left him a widower with a small daughter was the one and only matter upon which the two friends had never achieved complete understanding. Today, at the beginning of the experiment, Mr. Campion had first concentrated upon a village inn they both knew and had then remembered that at the time when the superintendent had known it best he had been courting the girl whom all his friends had thought to be the most unsuitable woman in the world for him. A wave of irritation at himself for choosing such an unfortunate subject had passed over Campion. Now, it seemed, this was the only part of his thought which had reached the other man.
He realized that he must make a clean breast of it, if only in the interest of science.
“I was trying to remind you of the pub where they served peacock,” he said unhappily. “Then it came into my mind that I was a clot for choosing it. I didn’t send embarrassment. I felt it.”
Spy work.
He was about to attend to his own homework. At the moment his link with Security was personal rather than professional. Once upon a time he had done a great deal of work for that curious Alice-in-Wonderland body, which is purely civilian and contrives to have no specific master, no powers, and no means of defending itself save by adroit evasion, but which exists to protect the Realm within the Realm for just those precise periods when it can be shown to be in danger and for not one instant longer.
Mr. Campion knew L. C. Corkran, the director of the day, rather better than a brother, since they had spent a war together, and that morning, after the incident at the railway station, he had been taken back in a temporary, unpaid and senior capacity. As he strode through the deserted streets he regretted his lost illusions. He was truly sorry he was not seeking some colorful contact lurking, perhaps, in a cabman’s shelter or, better still, conducting some unlikely bureau in a cupboard halfway down the emergency staircase of an underground station. As it was, he was merely looking for that safest of all telephone lines, the one belonging to a public call box one has never used before and never intends using again.
Important questions:
All the evening he had been trying not to think too much about the possible consequences of the extraordinary development the children had brought in. The one conclusion he had permitted himself was that so far as one could see, it was now only a discovery and hardly a working invention, but, as he had tried to suggest to Luke, the inventions would certainly come later. All that had been proved so far was that thought could be transferred from one mind to another sometimes, and that the process could be mechanically assisted, at least as far as reception was concerned. The transmitting end was still very dark. In the wrong hands…? He was off again, the thoughts racing. Which were the right hands, which the wrong hands? Scientific hands? Business hands? Government hands? Foreign hands? Kind but stupid hands?
Albert, to Amanda when she wakes him with a cup of tea:
“Nothing woke me but the desire to see you again.”
…
“How wise I was to let you marry me!” he said honestly.
Awwww….
When Mr. Campion went upstairs to pack an overnight bag and Luke slipped out to fetch the car, Amanda followed her husband. She closed the door of the bedroom behind her and stood watching him as he hurried.
Ever since he had returned to the house half an hour before, and all through their report on the End of the World Man, there had been something about him which had reminded her of someone she had half forgotten: a pale, blank-faced youngster whose continuous flippancy had masked an acutely sensitive intelligence which, as a teen-ager, she had adored.
An explanation occurred to her suddenly.
“Albert, you’re frightened,” she said.
He glanced at her, his pale eyes unsmiling.
“Just on the verge, lady,” he said briskly. “I’m glad you came up. I want to talk to you.”
Ha! (Why does it give me such joy when people call Campion “Bert”?)
The avenue of the years rolled back like a dream sequence from a nonprofit-making film, and the two stood looking at each other, lost in that incredulous dismay with which old colleagues see each other fifteen years older and far less changed than alarmingly overemphasized by the interval.
“Bert!” said the old man.
Campion’s ‘oh shit’ moment:
He came out very slowly, so that Mr. Campion had time to see him afresh.
The traditional upper-servant polish was still upon him: worldliness and casual bonhomie enveloped him like a robe. But for the first time Mr. Campion could see past them easily. He saw a man of forty-five, compact and essentially powerful, with the sloping shoulders and short neck of the natural fighter. He seemed in good trim if a little taut, with his shiny skin damp along the hairline. His eyes, he noticed, had lost all their idle amusement.
Mr. Campion had few illusions about himself. He had never carried much weight physically and was unarmed. He was reasonably skilled in those forms of judo which the West has adopted, but he was not particularly young. He was also tired from his all-night session with Thos and, worst of all, extremely irritated. He felt unlucky, and the stab of regret at his own idiocy in coming to the island without a weapon pierced him with a sudden sharp intensity.
This is still Albert Campion we’re dealing with here:
“I’m talking so long because I want a little something from you,” he said.
“Really?” Once again Mr. Campion was surprised by him. To save his life, he could not resist a flippancy. “Will you take a check?”
…
“Do you know anything about the invention?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Campion unexpectedly. “When it becomes universal, it will be the death of you.”
“Me in particular?” He was interested.
“You in general. They ought to call it the ‘Saint Patrick.’ ”
He had spoken lightly. He was growing desperately tired of the concentration but was yet very much aware of the disadvantage of making the first move. He did not dream that his reference might be recognized, let alone taken up.
Shitshitshit…
On both sides lay the treacherous mud, and the narrow track was deserted. Mr. Campion regretted that it was out of the question to make a dash for it. The van’s position-half over the edge and hemmed in by the Hawk-made escape that way impossible, and, in falling, he had wrenched the tendon of his right foot which had given him trouble ever since he had broken it some years before. The wind on his face was cold, and the forlorn emptiness all round him was overwhelming.
“Up the well-known creek.” A favorite comment of Magersfontein Lugg’s-his oldest and least presentable friend-slid into his mind and made him laugh. It was one of those irrepressible snorts of pure amusement which are unmistakable.
…
Mr. Campion found him terrifying because he was not pretending, and the precise frame of mind in which he approached the act he was preparing so obviously was limpidly clear. He was proceeding exactly like a professional killer of any other kind- like an executioner, a butcher, a mercenary, or a vermin exterminator.
=(
All he knew was that his life appeared to be about to end in a useless and ignoble fashion in conditions of acute discomfort while the chances of the murderer’s getting clean away with it were odds-on. His wits had not saved him; he had found a wilier enemy at last.
Amanda is the best:
“Lady Amanda Campion presents her compliments to the army of clumsy invertebrates who have had the impudence to bug her uncle’s residence for the past thirty-six hours…”
We end, unexpectedly, with a televised update:
In the past Mr. Campion had often found it difficult to believe his own eyes when watching on television the devitalized ghosts of people he knew, but tonight the medium seemed to have a dreadful intimacy.
Actually, let’s let Edward get in the last word:
“My father, who was a very famous man, told me when I was quite young that an invention belongs to the country of its inventor but that a break-through belongs to the world.”