14 FEBRUARY 1958, Page 21

It's a Crime

Slow Burner. By William Haggard. (Cassell, 12s. 6d.) Commendable upper-middle-class sort of MI5 entertainment, with senior civil service careers at stake; sardonic and. allusive conversa- tions in some of the better clubs; and some solid meals of the grouse-and-claret kind (and heretical notions on frozen strawberries). A little slower than Buchan, a little less naively snob than Dorn- ford Yates, a little less cruel than Fleming, but echoes of all three, most of them agreeable.