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More Work for the Undertaker (Heinemann,
1949) 'Reunion, cock. That's what this is.' Apron Street is the home to the ancient, decaying home of the Palinode family, once a great house of prosperity and culture, now a sad home sublet to a cast of former actors and variety-stage players, with the last remnants of the Palinodes clinging to rooms at the top. They are the least likely characters in the world to have enemies, yet the Palinodes have begun to die, and foul play is suspected. But whom to suspect? There is Pa Wilde, the chemist, the impudently named Jas Bowels, the undertaker and Lugg's brother-in-law, Mr Henry James, the bank manager, and Congreve, his shadowy assistant. Enter blithely one Albert Campion, called in to aid DDI Charles Luke in knotting up a group of apparently unrelated threads that all have one curious connection: that being none other than Apron Street. Sins of the past have a way of finding one out, after all... More Work for the Undertaker neatly caps the new, post-war Campion novels, beginning a new era with the introduction of Luke and the change in Campion's own personal life, following his marriage to Amanda. More Work for the Undertaker was dramatised for BBC Radio in 1988, and starred Francis Matthews as Albert Campion.
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