29 JUNE 1956, Page 22

MURDER IN VIENNA. By E. C. R. Lorac. (Collins, 10s.

6d.) Workmanlike example of the guide-book kind : the author has obviously spent a few days in Vienna, and slips in, here and there, quite a bit of its rococo charm; a whiff of its cooking; a twanging note from a zither at a heuriger. But the complications of the plot are pretty machine-made, what with startling resemblances, and superintendents on holiday stumbling over the corpses of their fellow-countrymen; while the press photographer is more oafish, obsequious, and illiterate than even a reporter would dare

describe him. •