It's a Crime
A Pocketful of Rye. By Agatha Christie. (Collins. 10s. 6d.) The Passionate Victims. By Lange Lewis. (Bodley Head. 9s. 6d.) Crows Can't Count... By A. A. Fair. (Heinemann. 9s. 6d.) The Ivory Grin. By John R. MacDonald. (Cassell. 10s. 6d.) Cork in Bottle. By MacDonald Hastings. (Michael Joseph. 10s. 6d.) A Private Undertaking. By Hildegarde. Tolman Teilhet. (Mac- , donald. 9s. 6d.) An Afternoon to Kill. By Shelley Smith. (Collins. 9s. 6d.) COMING back after some years to reviewing murder stories, I felt that, like so many more eminent practitioners, I ought to offer some matured views on the Art of the Detective Novel ; but on reflection I decided that such essays were mostly pompous nonsense. Apart from a rare work of art, these books are standardised articles, and the author's name is the equivalent of the brand mark. What readers need to be told is whether the standard has been maintained, and what is the general significance of the brand name.
The most popular brand names are those which depend upon the figure of the detective. Mrs. Christie's, for example : Hercule Poirot is, alas, worn out, and in A Pocketful of Rye he is replaced by Miss Marples, an apparently meek old spinster of phenomenal acuteness. Not so good a brand, though we may become used to it ; nor is the story quite so good. It is about a rich city man who died with his pocket full of rye—he had been sent some dead blackbirds —his wife died while eating bread and honey—and so on. Improb- able, but so competently written that it is much above the standard.
Lange Lewis's detectives, on the other hand, are as colourful as Miss Marples is grey. Too much so indeed ; Brigit Estels is a six- foot red-headed girl detective in the Los Angeles homicide squad and Mordecai Fentwill a learned, prosy and very aged little professor of philosophy, and they so over-act that they very nearly ruin what would have been a well-constructed if bloody story of the solving of the murder of a schoolgirl six years before. Mr. Fair's Crows Can't Count has the same detective as ever—Bertha Cool, the fat, mean and malicious employer of Donald Lam the narrator. The story involves emerald smuggling, a falsified trust, and a sensational tour in Colombia ; it is up to standard. Mr. MacDonald's Lew Archer, in The Ivory Grin, is a tough U.S. private detective of a type so common that he hardly serves as a brand-mark ; the story is a grim one of the cutting of the throat of a coloured girl and the protection of a mobster who has gone mad. It is on the level of a second-class Raymond Chandler ; that is, worth reading.
MacDonald #astings's Mr. Cork is an ageing but formidable head of an insurance office ; he may well establish himself as a reliable brand name. Investigating a dubious claim, he finds a desolate mansion in an inbred and hostile East Anglian village, a dead squire, an idiot, a murdered mistress, an opened tomb, an underground passage—in fact, all the fittings of a Castle of Otranto.
Murder stories which do not rely on the personality of a detective are harder to classify. The Doctor and the Corpse is located in Singapore Harbour : a junior inspector has to investigate the murder aboard a • visiting ship of its malicious, rich, tyrannous proprietor. There are provided within the confined space all the standard sus- pects (dear old mother, incompetent old doctor, oppressed young doctor, upstanding gallant nurse, neurotics, political enemies, etc.). A Private Undertaking is located on the Riviera where an advertising man is sent by a semi-Red film director of genius on an apparently innocuous mission to Yugoslavia, and is caught up in a savage two- way traffic in refugees through the Iron Curtain. Both pf these books are rather short, which is as well, for it is hard to stretch out these pleasant and exotic fantasies to full-length novels.
Shelley Smith is unclassifiable. She wrote in Come and be Killed one of the best murder stories I have ever read. She then wrote another whose name it is kinder to forget, and whiph seemed designed to reach the lowest level of lurid nonsense. (The murderer was the Chief Justice who crept along a secret underground passage from his mansion to a summerhouse to stick a knife into the back of a young man at the minute of his consummating the act of adultery with the Justice's wife.) Now, in An Afternoon to Kill, she has written a clever and beautifully convincing story about a priggish young psychologist whose plane fails when he is flying out to become tutor to a Maharajah's son. He has to spend a whole day as guest of an old lady living in a great house in the Iranian desert. She is a Victorian, of the type of Gertrude Bell or Lady Hester Stanhope, who spends the time telling him, placidly the story of the murder of her stepmother in her Essex home, a half century ago. The story is graceful, absorbing and real ; at the end of the day the psychologist, a little less self-confident, flies off in his repaired plane to his pupil. The book would have risen right out of the ruck, if Miss Smith had not at the end, with the equivalent of a schoolgirl's giggle, added what the publishers call " a really surprising twist." The last page makes nonsense of the whole story. I suppose one could tear it out.
All these books are well worth borrowing : none is worth buying.
RAYMOND POSTGATI
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