The Tiger in the Smoke (1952)

London, post WW II, consumed by fog. Foggier still is why someone would impersonate Meg Elginbrodde's husband, presumed killed during war five years earlier. Or is he still alive and wishes to prevent Meg's approaching wedding to millionaire Geoffrey Levett.
What begins as a knotty problem whose solution depends on a cartoonish detective named Luke, gains in sympathetic characters like Meg's father, the Canon Avril who says:
Mourning is not forgetting. It is an undoing. Every minute
tie has to be untied and something permanent and valuable
recovered and assimilated from the knot. The end is gain,
of course. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall
be made strong, in fact. But the process is like
all other human births, painful and long and dangerous.

The central character is a psychopathic serial killer, and there is a band of freaks who live underground, literally. This is a novel of its time when England was emerging from the war victorious but cleansed of its feeling of indominability. ( )

This is a terrific book with extremely vivid and particular characters and an absolutely palpable atmosphere of menace as a dangerous man stalks through islands of brightly lit places isolated and disconnected from one another by the encroaching fog. Whew. The woman could write all right. ( )

An excellent exemplar of classic British mystery writing. It's probably long been weeded from your library's shelves, but you could pick it up at a used book sale (as I did with my copy, which is, in fact, a discarded library copy!). ( )

Taut, susenseful, and utterly unlike most of the novels in the Campion series so far. Regular fans may miss Campion himself, but his few appearances show him changing with the years. The main characters are unforgettable in their own right, particularly Canon Avril, whose morality is central to both structure and plot.

The mystery itself is insubstantial; read instead for the Graham Greene-like meditation on virtue and vice, faith and despair. It's very 1950's. Few genre authors capture their own present as well as she does here. As an additional plus the exasperating elitism of the earlier novels has finally softened into a less off-putting moral conservatism . . .

Highly recommended. This one's a classic. ( )

Is the mysterious man in the photograph really the late Major Elginbrodde, believed killed in the war? How is he connected to the knife-wielding escaped convict terrorising fog-bound London? And just where has Mrs Elginbrodde's fiancé gone?

This mystery is tense and atmospheric. No, strike that. It's very tense and very atmospheric. It's impossible to say much without giving away parts of the plot, but this really is a classic mystery and it unfolds magnificently. Allingham's timing is superb, and the prose is excellent. Campion is rather in the background in this story, which means that it stands alone well for those who don't want to read the whole series. ( )