MURDERS FOR ALL
Busman's Honeymoon. By Dorothy L. Sayers. (Gollancz. 8s. 6d.) Dancers in Mourning. By Margery Allingham. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.) Who Killed Robert Prentice ? By Dennis Wheatley and J. G. Links. (Hutchinson. 3s. 6d.)
Rex v. Rhodes :,The Brighton Murder Trial. By Bruce Hamilton. (Boriswood. 8s. 6d.)
Murder in Hospital. By Josephine Bell. (Longmans. 7s. 6d.) Double Cross Purposes. By Ronald A. Knox. (Hodder and Stoughton. 7s. 6d.) Cry Aloud for Murder. By Paul McGuire. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.) Murder at Government House. - -By Elspeth Huxley. (Methuen. 7s. 6d.) Case Without a Corpse. By Leo Bruce. (Geoffrey Bles. 7s. 6d.) Armed With a New Terror. By Theodora Dubois. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.) The Affair of the Scarlet Crab. By Clifford Knight. (Gollancz. 7s. 6d.) Murder Most Artistic. By William Gore. (Harrap. 7s. 6d.)
SOME books are born of murder, some lead up to it, and some have murder smuggled into them. The authors of the present list vary in their methods from the austere cross-word-puzzle maker with his list of clues and succession of catechisms to the iraicate chronicler of persons and communities who reluctantly lets detection provide the plot. No golden rule can be laid down on the merits of methods. One reader will demand murders with a difference, another will have them almost " letter for letter, but that the name of Page and Ford differs." " Damn ! " exclaims Miss Sayers' newly-married lord, " And damn ! Back to the old grind. Rigor mortis and who-saw- him-last, blood-prints, finger-prints, footprints, information
received and it-it-my-dooty-to-warn-you." If this routine is your delight it may be found in plenty, but never where Miss Sayers holds her sway. Her domain becomes less of a law court and more of a court of love as she progresses. The love, to be sure, is of a Wimseycal kind that plays, with the flicker of summer lightning, around Gallic songs and English poets, village policemen, friendly family ghosts, and the improper handling of vintage port. Intellectual gaiety is its keynote ;
the crime is pour epater le bourgeois. And who shall blame Lord Peter's inventor for visualising thousands of enraptured readers panting, since the climax of. Gaudy Night was reached, to find out how the independent Harriet weathered her capitula- tion to the noble sleuth ? They will still be waiting. A few
small secrets of the bedchamber have been half-revealed ; but fortunately for our bashful couple, a secret was discovered in the cellar—with its head knocked in—which gave Miss Sayers an outlet for " detective interruptions," Lord Peter an excuse for the sentiments quoted above, and Harriet a chance to pose as sympathetic backer and to prove that her shell-shocked
Lord had need- 6f her.. Like.4-larriet1 we liact. best-appreciate
our Peter, or else leave the book alone ; for he has become-very much the star performer, whose reactions to the finding of the murderer are far more important than the identity of the man when found.
" The star performer " brings us to Miss Allingham, and another highly-decorated murder. Her setting this time is the chattering, gossiping, flighty and flashing, blown-out, scooped-out, constantly-collapsing world of the revue artist. Her hero, Jimmy Sutane, is one of its temporary suns. He dances, he enttances ; he becomes suddenly entangled in the murder of an elderly-young actress, and the outlook darkens. Miss Allingham, like Miss Sayers, is a skilful novelist. Her puppets always talk and act and have their being, apart from the particular dilemma that they enrich. Dancers in Mourning is below her best achievement, though it is probably the most intricate. Its theatrical setting is a handicap. The clever artificiality of back-stage talk masks too small a nucleus of urgency, and the entrancing Sutane, despite efforts to humanise him, is still a creature of greasepaint and body-twists. Had he been genuinely compelling, the suspense of the closing chapters would have been intense. As it is, denouement, decor, choreo- graphy—to cling to theatrical terms—are faultlessly worked out ; if we demand more life, it is because Miss Allingham leads us to expect so much.
To turn from the elaborate to the meagrely-clothed murders, the authors of Murder off Miami have cleverly put together another " case-book," spare and bare as to narrative, though displaying several exhibits and clues. It begins with a hand- written letter from Cicely Prentice asking a Police Chief to investigate the dropped question of her husband's death by poisoning. There follow photographs, typed statements, folded newspaper reports, exhibits of labels, stamps and railway tickets ; finally, the sealed pages with the " answer "—itself containing a turn of the screw that will make the book an awkward gift to schoolboys. -Rex v. Rhodes, another dose of crime to be swallowed neat, is the report of a Communist's trial for the death of a Fascist leader in the logo's. The author's intention to show the court influenced by politics becomes clear so soon that suspense is reduced to the mildest curiosity, leaving only an imaginary political situation to provide interest. The perfectly balanced detective story appears at last : MisS Josephine Bell -has produced it in Murder in Hospital. One rarely meets with a more satisfying, intelligent and enter- taining narrative, more smoothly embodying a perfect crime. The scene is a London hospital, the characters are its medical staff, the corpse—or the only corpse that smells to heaven— is a nurse, and the murders are on a highly scientific plane. There is little doubt as to Miss Bell's profession. She handles her medical setting with the utmost security and a delicious humour that grows naturally out of her material. Without detection her hospital portraits would be gloriously merciless ; with the detection (which blends rather than interrupts) nearly every scene takes on a double function. Injections, X-rays, operations, treatment of casualties, lectures on patho- logy, mistaken diagnoses, critical backchat, all, or almost all, these typical features have their connexion with the investigation. Of course, the medicos beat the Yard in- spector in such a case. For the reader technicalities are overcome by a careful blend of elimination and injection— to borrow some of the author's terms. I have always suspected that scientists are the best makers of a watertight plot ; Dr. Bell (unless the book is a collaboration) completes the triumph by her writer's craftsmanship.
After this, or even without the comparison, Father Knox's hunt for buried treasure in Scotland—and " Prince Charlie's " treasure at that—is rather weak-kneed. An adventurous aristocrat and a doubtful " Digger," a burnt garage (with corpse), some nocturnal swimming in a northern river, a dark island and a strong box and a .curse . . . if these entice- ments .please,: go in and prosper. As we tread the well-worn mystery track there are some Knoxian byways—but they lead back to the treasure island every time. And while the shades: of Stevenson are about, we may ponder on his saying, " Certain dank gardens cry aloud for murder," as 'misused by Mr. McGuire. Stevenson never meant this tidy urban garden belonging to a house in a seaside " Grove." And the victim—one of Mr. Eliot's damp-souled housemaids ! The solution is worked out amongst the Grove-dwellers, towards the end all rules being broken for the hard-working reader by the intrusion of an unsuspected motive depending on a course of Family History. I am never happy about these bygone skeletons that, at page 300, point their bony fingers at the vindictive slayer. A trace of one appears in Mrs. Huxley's murder of a Colonial Governor in Africa, though the matter is far more skilfully foreshadowed. Mrs. Huxley, like Miss Bell, knows and can satirise her particular community ; unlike Miss Bell she prefers to violate it with stark sensationalism born of aeroplanes and mountains and suggesting the old type of serial film that used to be done by
Pearl White and a double. .
For .a change. Mr. Bruce has made a murderer declare his guilt and die, leaving the detectives to search for the unknown body. This gives rise to comedy, when several hopefully missing parties confound the sleuths by turning up alive. Brevity, humour and a clever ending make this book a refresh- Ment from the finger-prints and rigor mortis-grind. Miss Dubois, presenting four murders in a single household, nevertheless produces an effect of surprising gentleness. It May be due to the pathetic way the family settles down after each funeral, or to the murderer's grizzly habit of pulling grapes off their stalks and eating them after every crime. Those who prefer shell-fish to fruit with their horrors should be warned that Mr. Knight's Scarlet Crab is a red herring. His story has enough tested and guaranteed ingredients to have won a competition this year in New York. A yachtload of ornith-, bi- and other -ologists, an important .manuscript, an island, a succession of deaths, a heroine with " speaking eyes," we know them well (and that crab of a herring—Mr. Knight is even a fishmonger !). To leave the doubtful scientists for demonic artists, our final victim, stabbed with a lead pencil, is painted with Winser and Newton's " Roman Red." It is pleasant to have a studio murder that is not all cocktails, but Mr. Gore should be a livelier designer than to keep oscillating to and fro on a single line. Was the artist murderer or murderee ? One vainly hoped to find that he was neither. Although both. these stories have pretensions, the art and science in them are tricked up backgrounds that cannot compare even with Miss Allingham's theatricals, far less with Miss Bell's convincing hospital routine.
SYLVA Noniabi.
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