Scotland Yard's Revenge

Six Against the Yard. (Selwyn and Blount. 78. 6d.) The President's Mystery Story. (The Bodley Head. 7s. 6d.)

DETECTIVE-FICTION writers, with their gifted amateurs who make rings round the official investigators, must long have been a source of irritation to Scotland Yard. In Six Against the

Yard the C.I.D. has its opportunity for revenge. Mesdames Allingham and Sayers, Father Ronald Knox, Messrs. Berkeley,

Crofts and Thorndike have each conceived and executed a

" perfect " crime : ex-Superintendent Cornish investigates each of these crimes and endeavours to point out the flaws which would bring their perpetrators to justice. The tales are all first-rate reading. I particularly enjoyed Miss

Allingham's lively account of two old music-hall troupers—

how authentic her atmosphere always is !—Father Knox's de- vastating cracks at a certain dictatorship, and Mr. Berkeley's " The Policeman only taps once," which very nearly lives up to its superb opening : "It was a dull sort of day, cloudy and raw like they get it over here, so I thought I'd-bump off Myrtle. She had it coming to her anyways."

But for all- their ingenuity and wit, my distinguished

confreres have the utmost difficulty in keeping Superintendent Cornish's attack out of their wickets. As I judge it, he beats Mr. Berkeley .'and Mr. Thorndike ; Miss Allingham forces a

draw : Miss Sayers and Father Knox do not perhaps play absolutely fair, the latter because he does not divulge the name of his murderer and the former because she does not thoroughly establish the fact of murder. Only Mr. Crofts achieves a win-

ning position : in his case I feel that Superintendent Cornish bowls too many no-balls in the form of unwarrantable assumptions.

The President's Mystery Story is another criminal symposium —criminal also, I'm afraid, in its stylistic atrocities. If, in the pursuit of excitement, you can meet unflinchingly sentences like-

" Ha was an incandescent adorer, and when he asked her to marry him, he could hardly believe his ears when she murmured her assent in a rich Slavic dialect."

you will find this book gripping enough. President Roosevelt proposes the problem, " How can a .man disappear with five million dollars in any negotiable form and not be traced ? Jim Blake is a millionaire who wishes to escape from money- making and his (Slavic) wife, and carry out personally a wide- spread social experiment. His problem is attacked, in the

form of a continuous narrative, by a team of American Write= which includes Messrs. Van Dine and Anthony Abbot.

NICHOLAS BLABS.