A Taste for Death
GWENDOLINE BUTLER is very good and getting better. She has, among contemporary English detective writers, a probably unique gift for the
macabre, coupled with excellent creation of
people and the ways they live. Coffin in Oxford (Bles, 1 Is. 6d.) is, like her last, an Oxford story, an unusually recherché death in a trunk. Miss Butler has, however, some things to be careful of: there are getting to be too many Dark Hints; certain important characters, including the eponymous hero, don't make enough appear- ances, while others are altogether supererogatory; the straw hat seems pointless and on p. 24 there is an ugly split infinitive.
Elizabeth Fenwick is something of an Ameri- can equivalent to Miss Butler and has the gift, rare among thriller and detective writers, of being able to invent original plots. Thus to tell readers that A Friend of Mary Rose (Gollancz, 15s.) is about a blind old man who protects a child in trouble is to tell nothing worth knowing about this clever, well-staged suspense story; it must be read.
The Chinese-style detective novels of Robert van Gulik, illustrated by the author with Chinese-style pictures, have a peculiar charm and a great sense of authenticity. In The Chinese Maze Murders (Michael Joseph, 15s.) Magistrate Dee, as is his custom, works on three concurrent crimes, finding adequate if not always happy solutions to each. Not a book for the squeamish, but the author's interesting notes justify the nastiness he puts in.
The Eye of the Needle, by Thomas Walsh (Cassell, 16s.), is a very serious kind of detec- tive story. It's about a young Catholic priest and what he should reveal to the police when he suspects his brother of murder. This Ameri- can book, a long one, covers the events of only one night, but suspense is maintained with ex- cellent questioning by a horrible, competent, sufficiently honest detective.
Ross Macdonald, as many readers know, is a thoroughly competent detective-story writer, specialising in West Coast private-eye stories. In The Wycherly Woman (Crime Club, 15s.) his gumshoe hero Archer searches for a missing student, and, after looking through private lives that in any other region would be unbelievably sordid, finds her. There still remains some in- credulity as to the amount by which an ex- perienced man can mistake a woman's age.
What Inn Rex Stout's stories always are, and how very nice Archie Goodwin is. The Final Deduction (Crime Club, 12s. 6d.) is a proper full-lengther, with some very nice deductions and, of course, plenty of good food for Nero and Archie. The. Night Seekers, by Kenneth Royce (Cassell, I6s.), is really a rattling good thriller. It's set in Athens, to do with post-in- dependence Cyprus; very nicely characterised and beautifully tense. Ian Stuart Black's The High Bright Sun (Hutchinson, 15s.) is also about Cyprus, as a great many books are clearly going to be, but this time about the war period, and better written and more interesting than many. The girl, an American Cypriot, wants to be neutral, but this is a war without neutrals, and too many people die for fear she may tell what she knows.
Really very surprisingly, Ian Fleming's new book, The Spy Who Loved Me (Cape, 15s.), is a romantic one and, except for some early sex in England (rather well done, this), only just as nasty as is needed to show how absolutely thrilling it is for this nice pitiable Canadian girl who's the narrator to be rescued from both death and worse-than by a he-man like James Bond. Myself, I like the Daphne du Maurier touch and prefer it this way, but I doubt his real fans will.
Kenneth Methold's The Man on His Shoulder (Macdonald, 15s.) is much better written than the ordinary run of thriller, and if finally less satisfactory—it should surely have gone on much longer—much more interesting. It is about a British ex-PoW who finds he has an obligation to the Hungarian Resistance who sheltered him, an obligation which, fairly undertaken as an inescapable duty, proves entirely destructive. The moral is unclear but worth arguing about.
Philip McCutchan's Bluebolt One (Harrap, 15s.) is a thrilling thriller with secret service high jinks in London and darkest Africa. The brutality is very brutal and often sexually tinged, and an ostensible liking for Africans seems be- trayed by events. Frail on North Circular, by MacGregor Urquhart (Boardman, 12s. 6d.), is the sad little investigation of the murder of a tart on, as the title suggests, the North Circular Road. Very good is the steady observation by Chief Inspector Smarles of the horrible caff where congregate the already corrupt and the all-too-ready-to-be-corrupted.
I should have been more ready to praise Alan Williamsfs first thriller, Long Run South (Blond, 16s.), if we weren't promised more books about its central character Rupert Quinn. As the anti- hero of a well-written story about the war in Algeria, reeking with sex, torture and general brutality, he does well enough. But if Mr. Williams sees him as a hero of our time, 1 don't like it. The James Bond type—Quinn is, how- ever, less strong-stomached--is not a nice phenomenon and one must deplore its multipli-
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