Crime list

Patrick Cosgrave

In any random new pile of detective stories and thrillers on one's desk a new Emma Lath; en must take pride of place. It is true that Miss Lathen's latest detective tale about her banker hero John Putnam Thatcher (Murder Without Icing, Gollancz £1.80) is a little below par, but the quietly witty writing, the marvellous evocation both of the Wall Street atmosphere and of whatever other world she chooses to throw the brave men of the Sloan

Guaranty Trust into contact with, and the subtle pattern of the plotting, are all there. The story is about what happens to an ice hockey team which the Sloan have been backing as part of a public relations pro

gramme. It fails until it acquires a star. Then both a potential bidder for the team and the star, are murdered. Thatcher investigates With his usual blend of half unwillingness and half fascination — and with the customary invaluable aid of the most convincingly rendered secretary in crime fiction, the redoubtable Miss Corsa.

If there is a failure it lies in Miss Lathen's difficulty to continue to sustain what is rapid

IY becoming one of the requirements of modern crime and thriller fiction — the creation Of a documentary background and, as a refinement, the creation of a secondary and

equally well-documented world which the detective must invade. As in the case of Dick Francis's last thriller there are certain indications that Miss Lathen has been ringing the changes too often, and the usual opening Paragraph on the nature of Wall Street is this time a little grey. A similar problem confronts another Gollancz female author Lesley Egan

in Paper Chase (£1.80). Miss Egan tries to provide as her basic background a police depart

Ment at work, but she has too many heroes, her lawyer Jesse Falkenstein, his brother-in

law Sergeant Clock, Edgar Walters, an old friend of theirs, and even a dog. Essentially,

two crimes are to be confronted: the murder of Falkenstein's crime fiction loving secretary — found with a page of a detective magazine stuffed down her throat — and a series of assaults by The Masked Monster, on middle aged women, but a number of other misdemeanors are thrown in as well, to show nOW overworked the police department is.

The backcloth which these provide is more convincingly realised than in any other re

cent book employing the same technique Which I have read. But the characterisation is rather feeble; and the connection between the

two main crimes is fairly easy to work out, so that one guesses the identity of at least one kriller long before the end. Actually, Miss r-g an could have written a far cleaner and tighter book, with a plot much more difficult

tO unravel, had she decided earlier which of her detectives was to do the detecting. Both these books remind one, however, not

°nlY of the apparently irresistible fashion for the documentary background, but also of the importance of characterisation. Detective story purists like to pretend that the puzzle is aT,I1, but every great puzzle writer — Doyle,

Dickson Carr — has a great character as well The combination of two sets of docu mentary, multiple crimes apparently separated, and characterisation (in this case the

ray in which a detective's character inwences his work, because a number of his n°n-police friends have been killed) all

PPear in the new book by that fine writer '‘eginald Hill (Ruling Passion, Collins Crime Club £1.70). No less an authority than H. R. F. Keating has called Mr Hill the hope of the English detective story, but I found the latest

7dventure of sociologist Detective Sergeant ascoe, his girlfriend Ellie and the egregious DellY-scratching Superintendent Dalziel Much less satisfactory than A Fairly Dangerous Thing. This is partly because the connection between the two major crimes — the murders and a series of burglaries — is dread11Y artificial, and partly because the story line is much less taut than Pascoe's emotions ; We frequently get lost in a maze of detail 'nd a mob of blurred characters. But it is also Perhaps because Mr Hill is inclined to dwell

the problems of his characters even when

%nese do not directly assist the business of uetection. Perhaps the most perfect example of dovetailed detection and ordinary human emotion I have read recently is to be found in a reprint

of read Irish's classic Phantom Lady (Sta

eY C1.95). This is a masterpiece which every

whodunit fan should go out instantly and buy. It tells the story of a man who has a row with his wife, walks out, picks up a girl and takes her to the theatre. Their relations are perfectly innocent, and they are seen in several places together. When he goes home his wife is strangled and, on investigation, his witnesses all insist that he was alone throughout the evening, while the girl cannot be found. He is sentenced to death, and the chase begins. The great point about this book is that all the perfectly ordinary emotions of the characters, strung to the highest pitch, become themselves integral factors in the business of the detection. A similar effort is made by Audrey Erskine Lindop, whose new novel Journey into Stone (Macmillan £2.25) is described by her publishers as a roman policier, a category about the precise nature of which I am uncertain. But Miss Lindop, for all that she has written an impressive, claustophobic and haunting novel, uses the work of the police as background to the convolutions of her characters. The police are hunting the perpetrators of a number of singular and often grisly crimes, but the crimes and the work of detection are used to bring people to their various breaking points: they have no particular value in themselves, as the abrupt ending of the novel indicates. Perhaps, with all the documentation, all the increasingly obsessive concern with characters as opposed to the character, and all the psychological detail, this is what the detective story will become — an injection into the body novel, rather than something in itself.

In any event such developments will probably leave unaffected the picaresque thriller. These tales of improbable adventure with engagingly caricaturish characters seem to continue undisturbed in the affection of readers. I commend Cape's handsome silverbound James Bond omnibus (Live and Let Die, Diamonds are Forever, Dr No) at E2.50; Stacey's reprint of Gerald Fairlie's Bulldog Drummond on Dartmoor at £1.95; and Bill Turner's romp Hotfoot from Constable Crime at £1.60. I am never sure about Turner's talent, but here, with a cat burglar hero, three potential villains, and a tribe of Amazon rally drivers, he brings off something well worth a quick read. I rather regret, though, the indication it gives that the thriller and the detective story are drifting ever further apart.