30 AUGUST 1957, Page 25

Death Won't Wash. By Norman Longmate. (Cassell, Its. 6d.) Ex-journalist

makes promising, conventional start with usual kind of detective story, about usual kind of pleasant public-school bobby asking usual sort of questions in such usual Places as Chelsea and Fleet Street. Victim—a woman journalist—is presented, quite seriously, as so 'spotlessly clean' as to invite office chaff and husbandly impatience : she took a bath a day.