16 JANUARY 1959, Page 24

The Case of the Hesitant Hostess, By Erie Stanley Gardner.

(Heinemann, 12s. 6d.) The author, quoted on the wrapper, says, 'I'm not even a writer' (and he can say that again), 'just a plot- builder.' As constructional aids, he employs not one but two pairs of remarkable resemblances among the characters; a hypodermic used on a girl in a motor-car Call of a sudden everything just went black'); and the apartment that just hap- pened to be vacant, opposite the one that has to be watched. 'A man never runs out of plots till he runs out of ideas,' Erie Stanley Gardner goes on. Lest the well run dry, let me suggest sliding panels, tape-recorders, amnesia, sleep-walking, and an undetectable poison from the arrows of a lost tribe of South American Indians.