21 MAY 1927, Page 27

MR. PRIESTLEY'S PROBLEM. By A. B. Cox (Collins. 7s. 6d.)—This

is an excellent mystery story, centring around a staged, and not a real, murder. Two young amateur criminologists are anxious to see with their own eyes how a murderer would act if one of them had inadvertently killed a man and there were no evidence against him. As the victim for their experiment they choose Mr. Priestley, an apparently stodgy bachelor of thirty-six. Mr. Priestley—much to the enjoyment of the " corpse "—is cleverly manoeuvred into committing what he imagines to be an accidental murder, and his subsequent conduct, ending, of course, in a romance, refutes his friends' idea of him as a '' cabbage' and affords the reader three hundred pages of rollicking fun.