Keep Death Clean

DEAiti is a ticklish subject and part of the crime- writer's craft is to invest it with acceptable tone. generally sound convention has been estab-

lished and where writers err—with too much feeling or detail or jocosity—we reviewers fairly criticise. Lately other ticklish subjects have been tackled: first, I think, nymphomania and, less °flea, satyriasis, then brothels and incest and, Most recently, abortion. Almost all, and notably the last, have been handled with bad taste, and writers should consider how it is possible or whether it is desirable to domesticate them.

These remarks have to be general lest too much should be given away about one of this month's books which contains the nastiest abortion details I have encountered in fiction.

Running Sand, Jonathan Wade's second

thriller (Collins. 16s.), is smashing. A journalist's Child is kidnapped by the Russians to prevent Publication of some articles and the mother goes i after her. Nothing and no one is quite what t seems, and motives and places are as solidly presented as events; thoroughly recommended, With the proviso that the dropping of Deirdre seems a technical error.

A Murder of Quality is the title of John Lc

C. arrd's second novel (Gollancz, 15s.), and so it is, and a very elegant one too. The setting is a small exclusive public school in the west country, the rnurderee the chapel-going wife ofa grammar-school-origined master in a High A. nglican environment. Characterisation and invention are excellent and the only fault is a PatlenY of suspects. Hillary Waugh is probably the best detection- writer that we—or rather, the Americans—have 4t present, and so far he's maintained a quite exceptionally high standard. The latest, The Late Mrs. D (Gollancz, 15s.), is just a little below it.

The odd death of the doctor's third wife receives the usual pedestrian yet cumulatively griPPing investigation, but this time it is a bit n_tore. Nte pedestrian than gripping, and the ending, des

kr, its final cunning quirk, is guessable from the early moment when the first clue appears. ilanno's Doll (Seeker and Warburg, 15s.) is read, Piper's second book, though the first I've „',ad, a clever little character-study of the old Viennese actor in the American hospital, Watched by the police and gradually discovering _that his guilt for the dead boy's body and his _beautiful doll are both something less than he had supposed.

..:It lay prone, so that the face was invisible.'

limes is almost the only detective- _voter who uses language with such nicety. In A

and Case (Ci ollancz, 15s.), Sir John 4_nd Lady Appleby investigate the death of the returned Crabtree in the disused canal beside the

dnu.b musty owned country house. A reasonable liddle-grade Innes.

Mary Kelly has, I fear, reached the point Where she must decide between detection and pehological fiction, and I hope she makes it the But her new book, Due to a Death elMieiael Joseph, 15s.), is far more about the otirtotional troubles of the insufficiently married 0.,Phan-narrator Agnes in the horrible village °' her refinery-dominated estuary, her fixations V' . her unknowing brother and the strange ' „Int .s,t,tor, than' about the mystery, which is to do her. only indirectly and is, in any case, in- aPpropriate and insufficient. '‘,V,ai!ing for Oliver, by Simon Troy (Gollancz, is an ingenious piece a Gothicism laced

with engagingly English feeling, the monstrous, murderous ex-public-schoolboy gripped in an inextricable love-hate relationship with his new wife-to-be and his ex-school chum. The locale is the Channel Islands. Improbability is rife.

ESTHER HOWARD