List of Recurring Albert Campion Characters - Campion's Family

Campion's Family

• Amanda Fitton first appears as a seventeen-year-old in Sweet Danger. The story of that book revolves round her brother Hal's attempts to regain his title, Earl of Pontisbright. Her parents are dead and she lives at the crumbling house of Pontisbright Mill with her brother Hal and sister Mary, and her American aunt Harriet Huntingforest ("Aunt Hatt"). They are very poor and make a living in a number of ways; Amanda is particularly skilled with machinery, supplying electricity generated from a converted watermill to her neighbours in the village and driving an electric car. The book ends with a scene in which she asks Campion to take her into partnership, and implies that she may be ready to marry him "in about six years".

She reappears in The Fashion in Shrouds, now working as an aircraft engineer; she enters into a fake engagement to Campion to help in their investigation. At the end of the book, they genuinely become engaged, but three years later in Traitor's Purse the marriage has not yet taken place, and Amanda falls in love with another man. Campion, who is suffering from amnesia, recognises his real feelings for her for the first time, just as she asks him to break off their engagement. Her new love affair ends badly as the other man rejects her as soon as she becomes available, and at the end of the book she and Campion decide they will marry straight away. She appears at the end of the next book, Coroner's Pidgin, revealing that they have a son, Rupert, and in a letter at the end of More Work for the Undertaker, fingering the villain. She has important roles in The Tiger in the Smoke, The Beckoning Lady and The Mind Readers.

• Rupert is the son of Campion and Amanda. He appears as a small child at the end of Coroner's Pidgin, and plays a significant part in The Beckoning Lady. He is mentioned several times in the later novels, during which time he goes to study at Harvard. He later appears in Mr Campion's Farthing, written after Allingham's death by her husband Philip Youngman Carter, at which time he is studying to become an actor.

• Val Ferris is Campion's sister. She is never mentioned before her first appearance in The Fashion in Shrouds; it turns out that like Campion, she has been disinherited by their family. In her case this is due to her marriage to an unsuitable man, Sidney Ferris, who turned out to be a drunk and died in a car crash. After that, she developed a successful career as a fashion designer. She marries Alan Dell after The Fashion in Shrouds.

• Hal Fitton is Amanda's younger brother. The plot of Sweet Danger concerns his claim to the title "Earl of Pontisbright" and to the throne of a fictional Balkan country, Averna, which is small but potentially very wealthy. He comes into his inheritance at the end of the book. He next appears again in The Fashion in Shrouds, by which time he is an undergraduate at Oxford. He has at least one daughter, Sophia, whose son is Edward Longfox, one of the two schoolboys who are at the centre of The Mind Readers.

• Canon Avril is Campion's uncle on his mother's side. He is an elderly, unworldly clergyman. He appears first as one of the main characters in The Tiger in the Smoke and again in The Mind Readers. His character was partly based on Allingham's father, Herbert Allingham.

• The Bishop of Devizes appears in two different parts of the series, apparently referring to two different characters. The first Bishop of Devizes dies before Look to the Lady, and leaves Campion a small inheritance; he is also mentioned in Police at the Funeral. The second appears, alive, in Coroner's Pidgin, as a wine expert.