Alan Grant, Adam Dalgliesh, Lord Peter or Roderick Alleyn.....

[CurlewKate]

You can only pick one. Which is it to be?

I’m glad they switched to Edward Petherbridge for the Harriet adaptations though, I never liked Ian Carmichael’s Wimsey (he looked ridiculous as the harlequin in Murder Must Advertise) and I think he’d have been thoroughly unconvincing.

It wasn't so much a switch, as a completely new set of adaptations wth a new generation of actors.

ISTR reading that Ian Carmichael knew he was too old, but he'd been wanting to play Wimsey for a long time, and hadn't been able to get the rights.

He'd played Bertie Wooster, so for him to play Wimsey seemed like a natural progression.

(And Wimsey himself must have looked a bit ridiculous as Harlequin. He was over forty by then.)

Phew! I was beginning to think I was the only person in the world who'd read Margery Allingham. I can't stand LPW, never could. Absolute pain in the neck and didn't deserve Harriet. Amanda Fitton and Campion are a much better pairing.

"And (of course) he's a wonderful batsman."
Yes-I find that essential. "A late cut that was exceedingly characteristic"

But (avoiding spoilers) don't forget what Rowan Marlow said!

I read all the Campion novels in my teens, when I read all the other Golden Age authors, but unlike the others, I've never had the urge to revisit them. Peter Davison was the obvious person to play the character though.

If we're talking about the women of the genre, though, Mrs Ariadne Oliver is top of my list.

Peter. Who also comes with a side order of Bunter to make up a stiff gin, run a bath, sort the ironing and serve food.

I wonder when and how Bunter learned to cook. He was a footman before the war, and then he was in the army. Did Peter send him on a cookery course?

Lord Peter. Remember true manners are never making the other party feel uncomfortable.

Random question - does anyone know how to pronounce the name of his nephew St George? I know St John is "sin-jn" but I've never come across another St George.

Gaudy Night should have been a proper 6 or 8 part series, though. The book is about 3 times as long as Strong Poison!

Bit like having the Strike novels as three parters - given that the first was pretty long and they’ve only got longer, having them as 3-parters has always been mad.

Lord Peter for me .l absolutely loved the books and the series with Ian Carmichael

@MissRoseDurward Actually, I might swap them all for Rowan Marlow......

Yes I was sorry not to have more of the Campion TV adaptations. Good casting.

How interesting that you read the books and never reread them. This is exactly my experience, I liked the plots but never warmed to Albert Campion. I did enjoy Lugg as a character though!

There was one book, Tiger in the Smoke, which I found really disturbing. The others were very readable but felt cold. Sorry can't be more specific, just the feeling I had.

BTW Margery Allingham wrote a memoir of her village during WW2, The Oaken Heart, which I can recommend.

And pervy Uncle Whatsit Delagardie dropping innuendoes, albeit highly literate, multilingual ones, all over the place, and telling you about how he took Peter to Paris to lose his virginity in ‘safe hands’.

@TeaAndStrumpets "
There was one book, Tiger in the Smoke, which I found really disturbing"

My mother's absolute favorite book! I must read it....

Oh yes, Paul. Yes, but he’s safely parked in Paris.

Tiger in the Smoke is my favourite Allingham book. It's meant to be disturbing. It's about what must have been a very pressing issue in the years after both world wars - how the particular qualities of psychopaths were useful in wartime, but not in peacetime, so what happens to them then?

Yes, I know, but a very long time ago, in adaptations that now look aged and rather stagey, and opposite someone I think was miscast. I would love to see a new six-part Gaudy Night with a magically de-aged Harriet Walter.

God knows who you could cast as Peter, though. I think the problem is that DLS changed her mind about him so often there are about five or six completely different Peters across all the PW books — there’s the parrot-faced silly ass about town, the brilliant scholar capable of discussing a subject he took a degree in many years earlier as an equal with top Oxford scholars, the action man/athlete, the diplomat who averts world wars all on his own, the war veteran with untreated PSTD etc etc.

And I don’t think anyone would adapt Gaudy Night now. Too much of a period piece with all those anxieties about female celibacy and women’s work vs marriage.

I think the silly ass about town was always intended as a pose. Like Poirot's (sometimes deliberately exaggerated) foreignness and Miss Marple's dithery old lady act, it caused people to underestimate him.

Gaudy Night is a book I read over and over, but I think it must be very difficult to dramatise - a great deal of talk and introspection against comparatively little action, and not easy to convey the Harriet-Peter relationship to anyone who hasn't read the preceding novels.

Thanks to this thread I am now re reading Look to the Lady which is my favourite Campion. Tomorrow I have promised myself a nice dose of Murder Must Advertise

Agree that Harriet Walter was excellent as Harriet Vane. Edward Petherbridge also very very good- though, as previous poster says, DLS wrote several different versions of him and it would be enormously difficult to encompass them all in any single film/TV series.

FWIW, there IS a film of Busman's Honeymoon - a very long way from the book - it's set in Devonshire, for example, not Herts/Essex borders and has two American Hollywood stars as Lord Peter and Harriet - made in 1940.There are still copies of the DVD available. I have no evidence for this suggestion - however, thinking aloud with no prejudice to anyone, IF the makers of that film had bought all rights and still held them when the BBC series was being filmed, a TV version with HW and EP could not have been made.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busman%27s_Honeymoon_(film)

I always thought that it was the same Peter, but a)getting older and b)using different facets of his personality on different circumstances. But I am such a super fan that I will excuse anything!