Holiday Thrillers
Up the Garden Path. By John Rhode. (Bles. 8s. 6d.) So Many Doors. By E. R. Punshon. (Goliattcz. 9s.) The Double Death of Frederic Belot. By Claude Aveline. (Dennis Dobson. 8s. 6d.) In What Strange and ? By Pierre Very. (Wingate. 9s.)
Case Book of Hillery Queen. By Ellcry Queen. (Gollancz. 8s. 6d.) To the Queen's Taste. Edited by Ellcry Queen. (Faber. 12s. 6d.) HERE is an interesting bill of fare, although some of our old favourites disappoint us. Up the Garden Path has all the usual John Rhode features—skilfully built up alibis, post-mortems in Dr. Priestley's house, Inspector Waghorn being stupid, Dr. Priestley of course solving the crime. Scrupulously fair, the clues are all set out with so little deception of character or incident that the solution is obvious the moment the second murder is committed. Moral: our police are not so wonderful. Arc you, gentle detective reader, a Priestley or a Waghorn ? Here is a chance to test yourself.
So Many Doors is Punshon's thirty-fourth detective story, and not his best. Bobby Owen, now a Special Commander in the Metropolitan Police, investigates the disappearance of a young girl from her home in London, and finds himself mixed up in an unpleasant group of black-marketeers and thieves. The action moves quickly to Cornwall, and there are more complications with cars, hotels, disused tin-mines and cliffs. Neither the characters nor the action sustained my interest.
Those of Michael Innes's many fans who look for more excellent detective stories from his distinguished pen, will be disappointed by The Journeying Boy, which is exciting melodrama with aU the
elements required to make a good thriller—a murder in a cinema, secret plans, distinguished atomic physicists, a long train journey, a sinister rendezvous in Ireland, a telephone call to the Prime Minister, and struggles to the death in a dark cave on the coast of Ireland. The publishers claim it as a novel of " mystery, detection, character and suspense " ; perhaps it is quibbling when all these arc present in plenty to complain that a little less wordiness would have deepened the mystery and heightened the suspense, without detracting from the excellent character-drawing, and that the reader is in the unusual position of knowing more or less everything before Inspector Cadover of the C.I.D. (Appleby's successor)—a device which may appeal to some, but will much displease others. This will make a brilliant film, somewhere between The Thirty-Nine Steps and The Lady Vanishes, and Innes has thrown in for good measure such gifts to the film director as a travelling circus and a slow Irish branch train.
Apart from the familiar favourites, there are two first novels, and two translations from the French. Death under the Stars is a first attempt at detective fiction by the author of Little Gaddesden, and, if the final sentence is any guide, may not be the last association of Superintendent .Charles with amateur sleuth, narrator, entomologist Dr. Baynes. It is an attractive tale that will not over- strain your powers of deduction ; Mr. Bell is plainly more interested in the people of his village than his plot, but his villagers are interesting, and humour and a pleasant style are employed to follow their doings to the nortkinexpected conclusion under the stars. The Lying Ladies is a novel by Robert Finnegan, and was first published in America in 1946, though it is set at the time of Munich. The author, himself a journalist, writes of a journalist, unsatisfied with the police solution of a murder in the small American town of Hamilton, who ferrets out the right solution despite official and unofficial discouragement includ;ng kidnappings, shootings, the theft of his car, and a good beating up. Well written, economical in plot and telling, with clearly-drawn characters and crisp dialogue, this makes very good reading and will make a fine film of the Thin Man type. The detection throughout is goad, fair and interesting—right from the puzzling clue on the first page. A first novel of consider- able promise.
The Double Death of Frederic Belot was published in France in 193z. Claude Aveline's aim was to win serious consideration in France for what he calls the " fashionable but minor genre" of detective-story writing. He succeeded in this, but his novel is not a detective story in the accepted English and American sense ; It is rather a novel of mystery about detectives. There are no clues, no long list of suspects, no detectives sifting and collecting evidence, ' no shifting suspicions. This is an exciting, arresting novel about members of the Police Judiciaire built round a fascinating problem. The detective Frederic Belot does not turn up for an appointment: an assistant goes to his flat and discovers, not one, but two bodies of Belot, one dead and one dying. Claude Aveline succeeds in carrying off this tour de force: a story worth twenty faltering who- dunits, but not itself a whodunit.
Pierre Very's In What Strange Land?, also from the French, is described by the publishers as " a thriller in the fourth dimension." A lawyers clerk has a series of extraordinary visions which convince him that he is slipping back in time and has witnessed a crime committed a hundred years ago. He becomes absorbed in the search for details of this old forgotten murder, and is convinced that he himself was one of the murdered people, and that, by a curious chance, in his modern reincarnation, he is revisiting the scenes of his former life. And then he discovers that he has been slipping in time, but not backwards ; his visions have been glimpses of what is to come and the story marches inevitably to its conclusion of murders. A far-fetched talc sustained by a pleasantly evoked picture of a village in the French countryside. No detection and few thrills —but an amusing evening's entertainment if you do not mind a tale in which events that have taken place a hundred years ago, current events and events yet to come are inextricably bound up in one narrative.
Ellery Queen fans, which must include most readers of detective fiction, will be delighted with these two collections of short stories.
The Case Book is an omnibus of the Adventures of Ellery Queen, first published in 5935, and The New Adventures of Ellery Queen, first published in t94o. Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine was born
in 1941 ; To the Queen's Taste, the first book supplement to zoz Years' Entertainment, contains thirty-six of the best stories so
far published in Mystery Magazine. Both books are perfect presents ; they shouldbegin every guest bedroom.
DILVVY14 REES.
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