NEW CRIME FICTION
Death from a Top Hat. By Clayton Rawson. (The Crime Club. 7s. 6d.) Antidote to Venom. By Freeman Wills Crofts. (Hodder and Stoughton. 7s. 6d.) Death of a Friend. By Margaret Masterman. (Nicholson and Watson. 7s. 6d.) Off With Her Head. By G. D. H. and M. Cole. (The Crime Club. 7s. 6d.) Step in the Dark. By Ethel Lina White. (The Crime Club. 75. 6d.) Murder Pays No D:vidends. By Gathome Cookson. (Muller. 7s. 6d.) The Port of London Murders. By Josephine Bell. (Longmans. 75. 6d.) The G!ass Slipper. By M. G. Eberhart. (The Crime Club. 7s. 6d.) Crime Against Society. By James Spenser. (Longmans. 7s. 6d.) End of an Author. By Jefferson Farjeon. (The Crime Club. 7s. 6d.)
MR. RAWSON, as befits a magician, makes his first appearance on the stage with a fine flourish and a regular bag of tricks. His victim, one Cesare Sabbat, is found dead in circumstances that suggest he must have been invoking a demon, while
the fact that his body is found in a sealed room suggests that he has invoked the demon only too successfully. However, we soon discover that Sabbat's acquaintances are almost all people who regularly pop in and out of sealed rooms before breakfast—Conjurers, Mediums, Escape Kings, Ventriloquists and the like. This makes things difficult for the New York Police, who keep finding their most precious clues and suspects disappearing into thin air and turning up again—when they do—in somebody else's pocket. They may be forgiven, therefore, for calling in a professional magician, especially
when he is a man so talented and agreeable as the great Merlini, whose better acquaintance we hope Mr. Rawson will soon allow us to make. No investigation conducted by Merlini could ever be dull : his routine is infinitely surprising : lighted cigarettes appear in ash-trays where there was no cigarette a moment ago, typewriters begin to click out messages in empty rooms ; and, beneath all this fol-lol, there is real intelligence at work. The only faults I have to find with Death from a Top Hat are that too many clues and revelations are left to the end and that we get no hint of the murderer's motive till the latt chapter.
In Antidote to Venom Mr. Crofts has broken new ground. "This book," he says in his foreword, "is a two-fold experi- ment: first, it is an attempt to combine the direct and inverted types of detective story and second, an effort to tell a story of crime positively." We are shown the mental processes by which an ordinary man, the curator of a provincial Zoo, begins to contemplate murder as a solution of his financial problems. His share in the crime, when it does take place, is the stealing of a snake from his own Zoo and handing it over to an accomplice. Neither he nor we know how the crime has been committed. We may feel that Mr. Crofts has not made the psychological interest intense enough to justify the comparative lack of detective subtlety, and that he under- lines his moral too heavily at the end : but the story has a genuine novelty of treatment that must commend it. Miss Masterman also has something new to offer us. Aunt Lucy is by no means the first old lady to have turned detective : but one dares with some confidence claim her as the first detective to have been a member of the Society of Friends. The murder-interest in Death of a Friend is subordinated to character and atmosphere : in fact, we should have had just as interesting a novel if there had been nothing criminal about the death of Lucy Firth's brother. The characters are presented at the start in such a way that it is rather difficult to get them sorted out. But we would forgive Miss Masterman more than that for introducing us to Aunt Lucy, for her description of a Quaker funeral, and for her delicious parody of Murder in the Cathedral.
The Coles open smartly with the discovery of a woman's head in a biscuit-tin in an Oxford undergraduate's rooms. The lady, it transpires, comes from Cambridge, but no significance need be attached to this. She is a hard case, and everything about her death and its investigation is pretty hard-boiled : even the Master of St. Simon's himself, otherwise a humane and charming man, receives the gruesome discovery in his college with singular equanimity ; one wonders, indeed, that he did not charge the murderer a decapitation fee. Step in the Dark deals in more subtle horrors. A lady novelist is kid- napped in the politest manner by a plausible gang of crooks, who set her down on a remote Scandinavian island with her two children as hostages, and compel her to ransom herself by writing a novel and making over the advance royalties to them. We may doubt whether even a best-seller's advance would be worth all the trouble to which this gang went : but the mechanics and the suspense of the kidnapping are excellently contrived. With Murder Pays No Dividends, we return to straight detec- tion. It is an ingenious, knowledgeable and well-told story which suggests that we shall hear more of Mr. Cookson. His Inspector Maddock, who investigates the death of the managing director of a motor-manufacturing firm, does not at first inspire confidence ; but, when he has discovered the significance of the hairy caterpillar, he forges ahead very creditably.
The remaining four books are more or less avowed thrillers. The merit of The Port of London Murders lies more in its pleasant description of Thames-side scenes than in its adventure or detection. There are smuggling and murder here, but the book is not Miss Bell at her best. The Glass Slipper, by America's foremost atmosphere-queen, is again disappointing : the atmosphere at any rate is too thick for my taste, though it does clear up at the end in a very exciting climax. Crime Against Society opens sympathetically with a wholesale kidnap- ping of stockbrokers. After this, however, the book becomes too frantic for words and could appeal only to advanced sadists. I liked Mr. Farjeon's book the best of these four. The author who gives it its title is pleasantly delineated ; Mr. Farjeon gives the plot a neat turn by interweaving a real with a fictional situation; and there is some good description of the East
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