4 MAY 1956, Page 31

CALL IN MISS Hoot. By Austin Lee. (Cape, 12s. 6d.)

There's an almost Daisy Ashford-ish innocence of eye and of expression about Milly Brown's Doctor Watsoning to Flora Hogg's Sherlock Holmesing, and spine-chilling accounts of places with names like The Cottage Loaf, where 'the soup was made out of one of those powders . . . and the trifle tasted of chemicals,' and such scholarly distinctions as 'peas, tinned, of course, but not processed. . . There's a murder, too, but the meals are worse than death.

CHRISTOPHER PYM