24 AUGUST 1956, Page 19

It's a Crime

SHE DIED WITHOUT LIGHT. By Nieves Mathews. (Hodder and Stoughton, lls. 6d.) Poison in the pension: aged Swiss landlady's death by arsenic contrived and explained in a notably well- written but too loosely-plotted first novel, with a cunning denouement that has been resorted to before, by another ingenious thriller-writer, but not in this generation.