MR CAMPION'S WINGS

A well-deserved honor for his brainy wife drags Albert Campion out of retirement yet again in 1965.

Under the sponsorship of Professor Emeritus John Branscombe, St. Ignatius College, Cambridge, has chosen to confer an honorary doctorate on Lady Amanda Fitton for her work as head of the Goshawk Project, which develops state-of-the-art aircraft designs. The only false note in Amanda’s big day comes when she’s spirited away by police officers who detain her under the Official Secrets Act. And even that comes with a silver lining: She has a perfect alibi when Branscombe’s former student Alan Wormold is killed in a suspicious and very bloody accident in the Goshawk workshop. Since Amanda can’t believe that workshop manager Alf Bagley, who discovered Alan’s body, is responsible for his death, that leaves only four suspects, all of them Goshawk employees: senior engineer Kevin Loder, American design engineer Gary Cupples, ex–RAF officer Nugent Monck, and self-styled old man Melvin Barnes. Offered the hospitality of Branscombe’s home and his housekeeper, the formidable Finn Astra Jarvela, Campion settles down to figure out who might have stolen some sections of Reynolds steel tubing and who might secretly be working to leak information about Goshawk’s latest project, a jet plane with swept-forward wings. Fans of this genial series should be prepared to swallow enough technical information about aeronautics to distract them from the possibility that Cambridge is home to an awful lot of guilty parties.

Alternately muddled and gently amusing.