15 SEPTEMBER 1961, Page 25

A Tapping on the Wall. By Helen Hull. (Collins, I2s.

6d.) Three deaths—and yet this is a quiet and unviolent novel about neuroses in the English faculty at a university in the eastern United States, where a professor falls in love, sort of, with a personable post-graduate student, and plots to be rid of his hypochondriac wife and a brace of interfering colleagues. A most intelligent, out-of- the-whodunit-ordinary and, at the end, a dis- tinctly disturbing tale of suspense and dubiety.