I'm Babylon burned inside out

It is unfair of me to keep using Margery Allingham's The Mind Readers (1965) as a punch line to the range of genres showcased in the Campion novels, but I have never quite gotten over its science fiction effectively capping off an otherwise realist series, especially the kind of paranormal, technologically mediated science fiction which I would expect to find in a Nigel Kneale teleplay. Its events should have diverged Campion's history considerably from our own in future books if she had survived to complete them, but perhaps not more so for Allingham than the Ruritanian existences of Averna or Turk Street or Alandel Aircraft Limited. Campion's world is so firmly shaped by inventors and artists and politicians and entrepreneurs we didn't have in our twentieth century, why not scientifically achievable ESP? It's one of my favorite novels in the series; I am delighted that it exists, but also that it exists in the form that it does. Even for late Allingham it's peculiar, not the spy-fi suggested by its industrial paranoia or the conventional thriller of its interrupting death or even a mystery except in the sense that it starts so murkily and ends in a confounding blaze. "These would all be adults, I expect." I am still recovering from last week's cold [n.b. checked out as such with doctors] and have been exhaustedly and frustratedly doing almost nothing of interest, but at least I am reading things I enjoy. Protip: the collected poems of Sean O'Brien backed with M. John Harrison's The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (2020) may do a number on one's head.