1 MARCH 1957, page 25

Dagger Before Me. By Manning O'brine. (hammond And...

6d.) Briskly written, immensely exciting secret-service thriller, set in the Damascus and Cairo of pre-Eden days, by a lively writer who patently knows his Near East, its......

Appleby Plays Chicken. By Michael Innes. (gollancz, 12s....

the same academic groves:if not from quite so high is bough, comes this fantasia on the twin themes of switched corpse and pursuit—nOt quite so 'donnish in manner as this......

- The Strange Bedfellow. By Evelyn Berckman. (eyre And...

I Is. 6d.) Closely fol- lowed by this tall tale—from an author who knows better—of a girl commissioned to find an historic and priceless gem, lost for centuries. 'Atmosphere' is......

The Gallant Affair. By Hank Hobson. (cassell, I Is. 6d.)

A new English crime-novelist gives Soho the Chicago treatment, let syntax and apostrophes fall where they will. On the very first page, the English private dick, who rejoices in......

Court And Constitution

Laws and Flaws. By Edward F. Iwi. (Odhams, • 21s.) Hhiti Government officials 'and readers of the correspondence columns of 7'he Times will be familiar with Mr. Iwi, a lawyer......

Borrow The Night. By Helen Nielsen. (gollancz, 12s. 6d.)...

ingenious, brilliantly readable, utterly incredible murder-puzzle : who threatened that the judge would be killed on the very morning that the man he had condemned went to the......

A Mediaeval Person

The Merchant of Prato: Francesco di Marco Datini. By Iris Origo. (Cape, 35s.) MEDIEVAL history has been much enriched by the feminine touch. There must be many for whom the......

. What No Woman Knows..by Neil Bell. (eyre And Spottiswoode,

15s.) Rather a lot of co- incidences—and a whopper to wind up with- in an otherwise admirably commonplace inquiry into seeming suicide by exhaust-pipe of middle- aged......

It's A Crime

The Case of the Four Friends. By J. C. Master- man. (Hodder and Stoughton, 12s. 6d.) The Professor of Poetry and sundry dons have all beguiled us in their time, and here, now,......

The Difference To Me. By John Bryan. (faber, 13s. 6d.)

Michael Arlen-ish heroine—though she bears a more Dornford Yates-ish name than Shelmerdene—moves through a London and Home Counties landscape seamed with racing cars, sown with......

So Difficult To Die. By Jean Matheson. (collins, 10s. 6d.)

The diary of the deceased is a well- worn device, but an author new to the genre, with a nice hand at character-creation,• makes skilful use of it in this study of death in a......

Woman Of Straw. By Catherine Arley. (collins, 12s. 6d.) A

woman is chosen, by advertisement, and groomed by a sort of Svengali to marry a millionaire who has not hitherto even heard of her. Succeeding, she 'transports millionaire's......

Robbery With Violence. By John Rhode. (bles, 12s. 6d.) The

style is not only pedestrian, but flat-footed : it somehow suits this story of theft from a provincial bank and murder in a pro- vincial town. Superintendent Waghorn has to ask......

Praise Be, Has Dropped His Maddening Custom Of Prefacing...

with a trumpet voluntary of praise. None of the three distinguished English contributors---;Lord Dunsany, Roy Vickers and Anthony Gilbert--is on top of his form, though Mr.......