The Negro. By Simenon. (Hamish Hamilton, 12s. 6d.) A Negro
is found dead by a halt- station in a dreary corner of north-eastern France, and the even drearier station-keeper thinks to turn a sou or so out of it by blackmail. A neat little tale, with all the misty magic with which French films invest the SNCF. The other new Simenon, Maigret Has Scruples (Hamish Hamil- ton, 12s. 6d.), finds a depressed and ageing Maigret trying to solve a Paris problem—who's going to kill whom?—by applied psychology, and not entirely succeeding. Another, even shorter, cOnte translated from the French, Catherine Arley's Dead Man's Bay (Collins, 10s. 6d.), has only three characters, one of whom, young woman, is deliberately driven over edge of sanity in forty-eight hours—unity of time, mood and place giying edge and impact to agreeably hor- rible little tale. More French atmosphere, as well as period flavour, in Englishman David Horner's The Devil's Quill (Heinemann, 15s.), a long slice of provincial life, with poison-pen busy in little town on Rhone in 1910: Balzacian detail of character and social distinctions make it utterly absorbing.
CHRISTOPHER PYM
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