6 OCTOBER 1961, Page 29

Full Term. By Philip Spencer. (Faber, 15s.) Implausible though he

is, Nicholas Blake does, at any rate, get his details right. Not so Philip Spencer, trying what seems to be a prentice hand at one of those death-among-the-dreaming- spires murder mysteries, with drug-trafficking dons, more coincidences than there are boats on the Isis, a claret called `Latour-Rothschild,' if you please, and a belief that one can tell from a Meissen figure, and thus authenticate it, the size of the kiln it was baked in. To spatter a thriller with status symbols requires either a good deal of scholarly reference-checking or as close and as lengthy an acquaintance with them as Ian Fleming's.