Come, Lovely Death
AGATHA CHRISTIE'S latest, The Pale Horse (Collins, 15s.), is one of those stories where only the supernatural, it seems, could possibly ac- count for events—and her apparently super- natur•al is first-class, with some terrifying witching. But after so good an impossible, the probable must seem tame, and the solution is not so good as this experienced hand could surely have made it, even without the help of Poirot or Miss Marple; the mechanics of asso- ciation and communication are unexplained, and a name on a vital list is unaccounted for.
A comparison of Laurence Payne's first novel The Nose on my Face (Hodder• and Stoughton, 16s.) with Berkeley's Trial and Error is not, as his blurb claims, a useful one, but this is still a very promising start, the reasonably realistic police investigation of a girl's murder which turns out to have wider ramifications. Chief In- spector Sam Birkett, who tells the story, seems very like a policeman and should wear well; and there are, for once, nearly enough pages to make a proper book-287 of them.
The Man Who Ran Away, by Daniel B. Dodson (Arthur Barker, 16s.), is very thrilling and has what is, for English readers at least, an original setting in contemporary fiction, a beastly Central American republic where corruption and total untrustworthiness are the normal pattern of human relations. The hero is a liberal (and therefore, through McCarthyism, disgraced) American flier, the two lovely heroines are usable and used Both the sexuality and the brutality are foul; poor little Hank Jensen was banned for far less. Mr Dodson's repressions are sticking out a mile.
'Which of you is hungover this morning? Which of you is on the needle? How many of you think you maybe have VD? Which of you girls is wondering if you're pregnant?' This is what the decent intelligent schoolmaster-narrator thinks as he looks at his class in an American town. Ivan T. Ross's Requiem for a Schoolgirl (Heinemann, 15s.) is a good story, neatly poised between kicks and uplift. Quidnunc County, by Richard Martin Stern (Eyre and Spottiswoode, I 6s.), is of the same highish level, a clever, sophisticated little American murder in one of those exurbanite colonies where morals have long been slipping and haven't much farther to go. Murderer of beautiful nympho guessable just too soon, but background good and a few of the characters not unlikeable.
Donald Moore's Highway of Fear (Hodder and Stoughton, 15s.) is a really riotous cloak and-dagger--pace, pursuit and Brocklebank, as it says on the jacket, and all the way, mostly by land, from Singapore to home with a beauti- ful Russian escapee and ambushes every inch of the way. If the Russkis could miss that often, they haven't a chance in the war, be it hot or cold. Wantons Die Hard, by Leonard Gribble (Herbert Jenkins, 10s. 6d.), is a grubby English toughie where the eponymous bad girls have been killed off and the goodish one gets tied in with the murderers, the avengers and, at lait, the police. Frills include drugs, dirty films and brutality. Jeffrey Ashford's Investigations are Proceeding (John Long, 12s. 6d.) is a good enough r•un-of-the-mill about regular police routine in a small country town, centring round the conviction of a constable for robbery; will appeal to those who like John Creasey's very similar stories.
A batch of American books includes The Big H, by Bryan Peters (Boardman, 12s. 6d.), a very melodramatic thriller about American Secret Service men who are trained to resist all pressures and who confront men similarly trained but not quite so good; a new Erie Stanley Gardner of which only the name need be given, which is The Case of the Terrified Typist (Heinemann, 13s. 6d.); and The Golden Man, by Frances and Richard Lockridge (Hut- chinson, 13s. 6d.), one of those American ladies' suspense stories where threats, kidnapping and foul deceits do not quite justify such passionately tense prose.
Those whose, peculiar passion is for real-life crime are well served this month. There is Colin Wilson and Pat Pitman's alphabetically indexed Encyclopaedia of Murder (Arthur Barker, 30s.), which is macabre in a Madame Tussaud kind of way. There • is The Concise Encyclopaedia of Crime and Criminals, edited by Sir Harold Scott, described as 'a former Chief of Scotland Yard' (Andre Deutsch, 50s.), a lavishly pro- duced and potentially not unuseful gift-book. And, rather nearer what Americans have started calling non-books, there is Kurt Singer's Crime Omnibus (W. H. Allen, 21s.), an American collection of tasty, titillating crimes.
ESTHER HOWARD
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