CRIME MARCHES ON
Double Death. By Various Hands. (Gollancz. 7s. 6d.)
7s. 6d.)
Murder in the Bud, though it contains no murder and little detection, is the best of these crime novels, for it shows us with great skill the kind of situation and motive that drive a nice, ordinary person to contemplate murder. Hilda Fen- church's lover, Ronnie, has thrown her over and taken up with her sister. She suffers torments of jealousy, which be- come rationalised into a passionate desire to protect her sister from the worthless Ronnie. Annie, however, refuses to be protected, and Hilda decides that there is nothing for it but to get rid of Ronnie. A fortunate chance enables her, by impersonating a certain Czech woman doctor who is visiting England, to obtain a culture of the deadly " Shiga bacilli ": this episode would ring plausibly enough in a straight detec- tive novel, but is not easily credible here by contrast with the realism of the book as a whole. At this point the Czech, a psychologist of great distinction, takes•a hand, and the rest of the book shows her gradually demonstrating to Hilda and the other characters their real motives. The Czech is, per- haps, a little too good to be true, and a whiff of the text-book creeps in at times ; but the duel of personality between the two women possesses a deep excitement.
Miss Stuart has written, to my mind, the best first detec- tive novel since Death at the President's Lodging. She has the essential gift, for this genre, of fixing a character in our imagination as soon as he appears under the spot-light ; and, in Stephen Dorset, she has created a private investigator of the new school—quiet, amiable, intelligent. Stephen's know- ledge of music it is that enables him finally to solve the pro- blem of the murder of the great conductor, Josef Hess, at Cupples Thorpe : we shall look forward to meeting him again, to say nothing of that flowering cactus of a girl, Disa. Two technical criticisms come to mind : a revelation is made on p. 211 which has been held up too long for no adequate reason, and I cannot see the police paying a private detective's expenses as lightheartedly as Inspector Flagg does on p. 95. In Drop to His Death two distinguished members of the Old Firm have got together and produced a very lively piece of work. The victim is a publisher, one of those men who seem born with the knack of getting beneath people's skins. He is found shot in a lift on his firm's premises, giving us an interest- ing version of the " hermetically-sealed room " theme—and inci- dentally giving Inspector Hornbeam and Dr. Glass the worst ride of their lives when they come to reconstruct the crime. The authors work us up to a great pitch of excitement, even though it is fairly evident from the start that the murder could only have been committed with the aid of some mechanical device, and though this gadget turns out to be of an almost cynical ingenuity.
I wish Asey Mayo would stop using the " I'd like to of idiom ; apart from this, he goes from strength to strength as the raciest detective on the literary scene. In The Annulet of Gilt, one of those agreeable books in which every character seems to be gunning after all the rest, Asey by no means has it all his own way at first ; the Cape Cod Prodigy has his pockets picked, his car stolen, his hat shot from off somebody else's head, and an elephant planted in his front garden. In spite of these set-backs, he works his way successfully through a problem in which Balkan politics and plain murder are neatly combined. Crime In Quarantine is by comparison a very sedate book. A party of travellers, flying to the South of France, become marooned in a château; one of them, an evident black- mailer, is murdered ; the crime is investigated by the Welsh detective, Glyn Morgan. The plot develops in rather too leisurely a manner, though the authors have a quiet way with them which makes it all quite convincing. Morgan's summing- up at the end surely takes too much for granted at several points, and some readers will disapprove of his action in letting the murderer go scot-free. Double Death is an experiment in composite or snowball detective writing. Six authors are in- volved—Mesdames Sayers and Tennyson Jesse, Messrs. Crofts. Valentine Williams, Anthony Armstrong and David Hume. Miss Sayers outlines the murder situation—the poisoning of a disagreeable hypochondriac, and each of the other five adds a chapter, together with notes on the development of the plot. The book, Unfortunately, is more like a free-for-all battle of wits than a collaboration between the distinguished contribu- tors ; indeed, in the general confusion Miss Tennyson Jesse is led into committing a small private crime of her own—" me (who has never been able to read an A.B.C. Time-Table)."
Miles Burton is rather off colour in Death Leaves No Card. Though the murder-method here has considerable ingenuity, we know pretty well after 6o pages how the plot is going to work out, and the characters are not interesting enough in themselves to keep our attention engaged. Hasty Wedding will provide plenty of thrills for the more ingenuous reader ; its heroine is a hysterical little puss, and the plot depends too much on the hero flinging red herrings at the police. Who Dialled 999 ? is all right if you do not mind a few clichés and a good deal of padding : myself, I prefer writers who throw in passages from the Encyclopaedia Britannica when their inspira- tion temporarily flags ; also, I don't like " the preposterous per- son who had, a month before, kept he and his staff . . ." Mr. Newman, on the other hand, is a model to writers both for his style and inventiveness. Maginot Line Murder com- bines spying, detection and thrills in admirable proportions ; the French detective, Papa Pontivy, is a charming eccentric, and what Mr. Newman does not know about the detail of the Maginot Line could be put in a nutshell and posted off to the
Previous page
