13 FEBRUARY 1959, Page 30

Out Brief Candle. By John and Elizabeth Rosenberg. (Hogarth Press,

13s. 6d.) The mur- dered man had spurned his mistress, flouted his wife, insulted his secretary and inexplicably asked three old enemies to come and stay. All had motive, opportunity and no alibi. There was a guilty secret in his past and a sullen bye-child old enough to exact retribution. The solution comes by way of a two-page murderer's mono- logue, recited as he holds his knife to the heroine's bosom in the penultimate chapter. Almost every constructional clichd known to the detective stories of before the First World War, in fact, in what is undoubtedly the worst since