Albert Campion has attended the funeral of Pig Peters before.
So, when the thoroughly unpleasant man appears to have died again five months later, Campion finds himself drawn into one of Margery Allingham’s strangest and most entertaining mysteries.
This Deep Dive includes Spoilers. We invite you to listen to the original play first then join us for our in-depth discussion.
In this Chesterton Radio Deep Dive, we return to the 1982 BBC Saturday Night Theatre production of The Case of the Late Pig, with James Snell as the deceptively mild Albert Campion and Cyril Shaps as the incomparable Magersfontein Lugg.
We explore Allingham’s wonderfully peculiar detective, Campion’s place beside Poirot and Lord Peter Wimsey, the marvelous Campion–Lugg partnership, and the story’s unusual mixture of black comedy, English eccentricity, genuine menace, and Golden Age detection.
We’ll also listen closely to what the BBC brought to Allingham’s story—turning a mystery narrated by Campion himself into a rich 90-minute radio drama.
A corpse that won’t stay buried. A detective who rarely looks like one. And a mystery that remains enormous fun nearly ninety years after it was written.
Welcome back to Saturday Night Theatre.
