Dons and Beaks

Bury Him Darkly. By Henry Wade. (Constable. 7s. (3d.) Man Overboard. By Freeman Wills Crofts. (Crime Club. 7s. tkl.) Where is Barbara Prentice ? By Miles Burton. (Crime Club. 7s. 6d.)

The Uncounted Hour. By Warner Allen. (Constable. 7s. 641.) The Ghost It Was. By Richard Hull. (Faber and Faber. 7s. 6d.) Deathblow Hill. By Phoebe Atwood Taylor. (Gollancz. 7s. 6d.) The Tangled Miracle. By Huxley Hearne. (Nelson. 7s. 6d.) Middle Class Murder. By Bruce Hamilton. (Methuen. 7s. 6d.) This Man is Dangerous. By Peter Cheyney. (Collins. 7s. 6d.) DONS and beaks, there is no doubt about it, make capital murderers. Fiction, crime-fiction in particular, has accus- tomed us to the highly spiced dishes of malice and un- charitableness served up at High Tables, to the steamy atmosphere of sedition and priiry conspiracy pervading Common Rooms. In actual Act, all the blood feloniously spilt in our academies of learning during the last hundred years would probably go into a medium-sized ewer. But that is unimportant. The tradition is the thing ; and detec- tion-writers are only following in the irreproachable steps of Lord Tennyson, who—it will be remembered—spoke of " don or devil " in the same breath.

Mr. Ernes, postulating a university midway between Oxford and Cambridge—at Bletchley, to be precise—kills off Dr. Umpleby, President of St. Anthony's, and surrounds the corpse with bones. The Fellows of this college are very strong on anthropology : so Inspector Appleby has plenty of suspects to start with. Appleby, by the way, is a graduate of St. Anthony's, and quite one of the most intelligent, charming and cultured detectives on the books. He needs to be, too : for he is pitting his wits against some of the most formidable brains in England, and—as we learn in the sequel—half the Common Room have something to conceal. Death at the President's Lodging is the most brilliant first novel I have had the luck to read. It is perhaps too complicated to become a classic in this genre. But Mr. Innes commands such a battery of wit, subtlety, learning and psychological pene- tration that he blows almost all opposition clean out of the water.

Our next three writers reintroduce us to the rigours of the game. They are solid, painstaking, and masters of their craft. Bury Him Darkly opens with burglary in a jeweller's shop and the killing of a night-watchman. The case is put in charge of Chief Inspector Burr ; but before long he disappears, and little doubt is left that he has been murdered, too. The veteran crime-fan will not have much difficulty in laying his hand on those responsible ; but he will be clever indeed if he breaks down the alibis which give Superintendent Fraser and Inspector Poole so much trouble. The personalities of these three detectives are brought out with great skill : the author is more successful with them than with his suspects. Mr. Wade knows all there is to be known about the detail of police work ; it is this which makes his book so absorbing and enables us to follow him through a maze of alibis that, in the hands of most writers, would become insufferably tedious. In Man Overboard Chief-Inspector French co-operates again with those smart Ulster policemen, Rainey and McClung, whom the reader met in Sir John Magill's Last Journey. The plot hinges upon a group of scientists who have invented a method of rendering petrol inert and re-transforming it : this, by eliminating all danger of fire, is clearly the invention of the century and worth untold money. Pratt, a representative of an English firm, is sent over to Ireland to test the invention. On the way back he disappears, and later his body is picked out of the sea. The Coroner's Jury plumps for suicide : but later it is made evident that Pratt had stolen the formula and been murdered. To criticise Mr. Croft's construction is almost as unseemly as to suggest a flaw in a Rolls-Royce engine : I should have thought, however, that post-mortem examination of the dead man's lungs would have revealed the method of the crime ; and the number-of posSible suspects is ' too severely limited. Mr. Burton presents us with a piece of a crnan's fur coat fo-und on an engine's buffer and her handbag • concealed in a pile of sleepers, and asks us to find the corpse. Barbara Prentice, a spiteful gossip, disappears_ so thoroughly that Inspector Arnold and Desmond Merrion, though they - have different theories of the murderer's identity, take 806

pages to find the body. The most promising suspect seems to be Dr. Prentice, her husband, a rough-tongued, prickly fellow for whom the reader is made to feel a covert sympathy throughout. Mr. Burton is always ingenious and diligent : here, paying greater attention to character and background, he has written his best book. -

Mr. Warner Allen, joint author with Mr. E. C. Bentley of Trent's Own Case, now performs a solo with great virtuosity. He reminds us of Mr. Bentley at several points ; there is the

same whimsicality, the same mercilessness in exposing humanity's more despicable traits, and the same posing of evil deeds against a background of good living. During the " uncounted hour "—the hour gained when clocks are put back for winter time—Sir Godric Fitzwaren dies of gas-poisoning. But for the known character of the dead man, and a too clever improvisation on the part of a murderer, it would have passed for suicide. But Puck, an eccentric journalist, finally brings the criminal to book, sacrificing his own life in the process. Sir Godric's exotic wife, her lover, and several unsavoury financiers fall in turn under

suspicion. To create the- surprise of his denouement, Mr.

Warner comes perilously near to suppressio veri ; but just, I think, avoids it. Mr. Hull continues to exercise his remark-

able talent for the creation of wholly unpleasant characters.

James Warrenton, a mean-spirited old millionaire, who buys his books by the ton and bullies his relatives by the hour, has taken up spiritualism. He buys a ghost—or, to be more

accurate, a haunted mansion. This gives his relatives an opportunity to impose upon him and discredit each other in

his eyes ; an opportunity they are not slow to seize. His nephew, Arthur, dresses up as the ghost, only to be pushed off the haunted tower by the real ghost. Or was it ? Mr.

Fenby, representing the Departed Spirits Association, resents

this slur upon the good name of his clientele : his investigations finally expose the murderer, but not before James Warrenton

himself has gone the same way. A sprightly (in the ancient and the modern sense) tale, though not up to Mr. Hull's best.

Deathblow Hill is below Miss Taylor's usual standard. Both her wit and her construction seem a bit tired. The story

opens excitingly enough with a feud between the two branches of the Howes family, each of which believes that the other has got hold of the hidden fortune of the late Bellamy Howes.

There is also a plague of yellow silk handkerchiefs : Tabitha Newell is followed by an unknown man wearing one, and a wave of garrotting ensues. After that, however, the tale flags ; and Asey Mayo is only a blurred reproduction of his real self. Mr. Hearne is to be congratulated on inventing an original murder-setting. Mrs. Agatha Weir, founder and high-priestess of the Assumptionist cult, believes that when she dies she will be carried bodily up to heaven like Elijah. A temple is built, with a roofless tower to facilitate her ascent : and sure enough, on the night fixed for this miracle, she disap-

pears. Mortimer Hood, a celebrated scientist and exposer of fake-spiritualism, is called in ; in due course he proves

that Mrs. Weir's disappearance was caused by human agency. I hope we shall hear more of Mr. Hearne and Mortimer Hood.

Middle Class Murder is one of the best realist crime-stories that has come my way. The growing determination of Tim

Kennedy, a popular and successful dentist, to kill his invalid wife ; the last-minute abandonment of one attempt and the horrifying success of the second ; Kennedy's gradual

deterioration under blackmail—for his secret has become known to one other person ; his desperate efforts to rid himself of his tormentor :—all this is developed with quite unusual psychological insight and factual plausibility. It is seldom that a crime-novel arouses in the reader pity for a victim and horror of a murderer. But Mr. Hamilton writes so well `that, paradoxically, it sometimes costs us quite an effort to turn over the page and read on. Finally, let me recommend a very slick, well-constructed, and really thrilling " thriller." This Man is Dangerous tells of the importation of American gangsters and their methods into England. It is an idea that has been used before, but never with such conviction and such authentic dialogue. These gangsters are operating the kidnapping racket and have worked out a plot to " snatch " the daughter of a millionaire. They are foiled in the end by a G.-man.

NICHOLAS BLAKE.