12 JULY 1957, Page 32

The Colour of Murder. By Julian Symons. (Collins, 10s. 6d.)

Resounding return to form by one of our most ingenious and stylish—but not most consistent—home-grown crime novelists, especially good at middle middle-class, sub-urban, sub-life. Here is the story, as told to the psychia- trist, of the young man from the Complaints Department, his possessive mother, his anxious- to-be-refined wife, and the girl at the public library, Clapham way. Then the violent death, the trial, the sentence; and the doubt in the reader's mind. Life as lived in tea shop and tennis club; death as dished up in the Sunday paper—but excruciatingly more readably - and revealingly dished up here.