DETECTION AND SHOCK
Tenant for Death. By Cyril Hare. (Faber. 7s. 6d.) The Door Between. By Ellery Queen. (Gollancz. 7s. 6d.) Bats in the Belfry. By E. C. R. Lorac. (The Crime Club. 75. 6d.)
Death at the Club. By Miles Burton. (The Crime Club. 7s. 6d.) The May Week Murders. By Douglas G. Browne. (Longmans. 75. 6d.)
No Flowers by Request. By Stuart Palmer. (The Crime Club. 7s. 6d.) Maiden Possessed. By John Newton Chance. (Gollancz. 7s. 6d.) The Feather Cloak Murders. By The Teilhets. (Gollancz. 7s. 6d.)
MR. NICHOLAS BLAKE, like Mr. Bailey, Mr. Bentley and a few others, writes the kind of detective novels in which the graces, and to some extent the muses, play a. certain part. In this
kind the solution is usually provided by an amateur detective of cultivated and often literary tastes, whose wit provides the relief ; in fact, such novels are highbrow in the best sense of the word. I admit to a strong bias in favour of this kind ; but even allowing for such bias, I can safely mark There's_Trouble Brewing alpha plus. The graces are not allowed to interfere with the main business, which is the presentation, through the mind of Nigel Strangeways, of the mystery, its ramifications, and the clues. Strangeways is invited, as author of a book on the Caroline poets, to read a paper to a literary society in a small Dorset town, where he stays with the doctor (an old Oxford acquaintance) and the doctor's charming wife. He is imme- diately engaged by Bunnett, the local brewer, a universally detested man, to enquire into the recent death of the brewer's dog, who was found floating in the open copper of the brewery. The next day, Bunnett's (?) corpse is found in the closed copper.
There are several suspects, including the doctor. The ensuing fun, which includes a second murder, is as grim, fast and lively as it should be, and the characterisation is good without over- balancing the design. Now and then, especially at the start, Mr. Blake's wit declines into facetiousness, either from Woodhouseian high spirits, or from deliberate desire to write down to the middlebrows. Otherwise, there is no fault to find.
For many readers, the curious setting of There's Trouble Brewing will add to its charm. Other merits being equal, no setting can be too ordinary for me, so that I was delighted at Mr. Hare's choice of a respectable South Kensington Gardens " as his scene. Tenant for Death (a beautifully appropriate title) is Mr. Hare's first book, and readers should note here that a new star has risen. As regards wit (here so restrained as to be easily overlooked), fair play, and characteri- sation, Tenant for Death belongs to the class described above— it contains a solicitor called Prufrock—but it diverges in having no amateur detective. The solution is reached by Inspector Mallett, a nice man who likes, but does not always get, his regular meals. Given that, as Crown Prosecutors so often say, no motive is adequate for murder, the motive is adequate ; and the way in which an air of probability is combined both with clear, terse narrative and with a good deal of subtle urban atmosphere, proves the extreme skill of the writer.
The next four books are not in the same kind or class. The Door Between displays another Ellery Queen exploit, with a New York well-to-do literary background. It has a compli- cated and highly-improbable plot ; and it seems odd that the possibility of suicide did not occur to anyone for many chapters after Karen Leith had been found stabbed. Bats in the Belfry is readable if you don't mind undistinguished writing, but the relevant dates should be made clearer at the outset—Mr. Hare's plan of dating each chapter is a very good one. Mr. Lorac draws another nice Chief Inspector, sketches byways of London agreeably, and provides some tense excitement towards the close. I enjoyed the book more when the hearty Grenville had been somewhat cowed by circumstances and the police. The print provided by the publishers is unfair to the author. Death at the Club begins well, with a meeting of the Witchcraft Club (which studies but does not practise the black arts), but it consists too much of conversation. Nor is it well-written. All the club members are suspects, including the K.C. " whose name was a household word in the criminal courts "—a fair specimen of Mr. Burton's style. The May Week Murders is told by the wife of the amateur detective, a self-satisfied, jocose woman, proud of being unintellectual. There is lots of incident, and the topography of Cambridge is accurate ; but such atmosphere as there is, is wrong, and the caricatures who pass for characters are ill-observed ; aesthetes, for instance (the narrator's bites noires) do not at this date sneer at the United States.
The last three books on the list are hybrid shockers. No Flowers by Request is narrated by a member of a large family, most of whom are converging from different parts of America on the deserted Californian town to spend Christmas with rich Uncle Joel. They hope to find Uncle Joel certifiable, and thus, owing to the provisions of a will and a trust, to obtain his money. Having received them inhospitably, Uncle Joel stages his own death in a fire. The manner of telling is so wild and haphazard that the reader soon throws up the sponge as far as clues are concerned ; I am too bewildered to be sure whether Mr. Palmer plays fair or not ; and, in effect, this means that he does not. Maiden Possessed, on the other hand, is profoundly, indeed painfully, British. Its setting is the New Forest, its hero and chief suspect is a huge, red-headed, child-hearted radio manufacturer ; its amateur detective is a clever school-girl with loads of sex appeal ; its Superintendent is a lean man called Smutty, full of repressed sentiment ; and one of its villains
is suave, white haired and plausible. I simply could not understand this man's self-control in not murdering the odious girl Pat when he had the chance. It will now be understood why the sober game of detection is impossible to play with Mr. Chance. The same objection applies, in part, to The Feather Cloak Murders. In this the detective, the Austrian Baron von Kaz, is a carefully conceived and studied character--childishly vain, brave, cowardly, astute—but the melodramatic plots and counterplots in which he is involved, in Hawaii, and the obvious villains, tough babies, and exquisitely-gowned damsels with whom he is surrounded, make him out of place, and sadly wasted. Because of its many exciting, exotic scenes, particularly the climax in the subterranean caves, it is a suitable book for
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