23 MARCH 1956, Page 22

It's a Crime

OLD HALL, NEW HALL. By Michael Innes. (Gollancz, 12s. 6d.) Look where Lucky Jim's landed! Slap in the middle of one of those Oxford-Companion-to-English-Literature Times-crossword- puzzle crime stories—written about Redbrick, but by Greystone. Full of high spirits, pastiche, quotation-capping conversations; a fetchingly ambiguous young woman; and the crime itself— when you come tp it, and if it is a crime—intellectually aristocratic at any rate, and quite painless. What Miss Sayers and her Lord Peter did a generation ago to bring U-usage to the whodunit, Mr. Innes does for the literary snobs of our own time.