As You Like It
Tinsley's Bones. By Percival Wilde. (Gollancz. 8s. 6d.) The Widening Stain. By Bolingbroke Johnson. (The "Bodley Head. 7s. 6c1.) Fear Comes to Chalfont. By F. W. Crofts. (Hodder and Stoughton. 8s. 641) The Conqueror Inn. By E. R. Punshon. (Gollancz. 8s. 6d.) The Worsted Viper. By Gladys Mitchell. (Michael Joseph. 8s. 6d.) The Strip Tease Murders. By Gypsy Rose Lee. (The Bodley Head. 7s. 6c1.)
Tinsley's Bones and The Widening Stain are good American detec- tive stories, and as bright and cheerful as it is possible to be about murder. Tinsley's Bones is a knockabout farce with a fair puzzle embedded in it, the solution is already in the public domain, and known to all students of American folklore, but the thing remains a surprise for all that. It is a very nice change to have a detective story that is not sticky with sadism. The jokes are mainly on the New England humour tack, and pretty easy going. The Widening Stain is about a murder in a university library, and the author, who would seem to be a member of a university faculty, has a good deal of simple fun with university affairs. There is a dinner party, at which an economist comes to grief, which is very very funny, and the characters are drawn with a nice sense of caricature. The puzzle is soundly constructed, and works out reasonably enough, but there is just something missing that places the story below the first class. Fear Comes to Chalfont is by Mr. Freeman Wills Crofts, and is therefore a soundly constructed affair so far as mechanics are concerned. Unfortunately the puzzle is one which
an alert ten-year-old could break on inspection, without any reason- ing or picking about for clues, and interest in French's stately progress towards a solution is difficult to maintain. Mr. Punshon gets away to a fine romantic start with a lonely grave near a huge stone-built public house in the centre of a wild and melancholy moor, but the whole thing peters out in a muddle about the I.R.A. and lorry hi-jacking on the Black Market. The puzzle is over- elaborate, and the solution is like one of those Chinese balls with a ball inside a ball inside a ball. The Worsted Viper might be attributed to war anxiety neurosis2—black magic supplies the motives and Mrs. Bradley and the giggling girls from the teachers' college encounter three butchered prostitutes, a butchered male, a butchered half-wit girl, and end up at a sabbat with a naked virgin lashed to an altar tended by a tongueless acolyte. The puzzle is no great shakes, and the red herrings hanging on it so, silly that they produce laughter in the wrong places. In The Strip Tease Murders we have our long-lost-friend the mysterious Chinaman, and, although he is dragged in by the back hair, and his ginseng root is of the wildest irrelevance to the matter in hand, it is impossible not to welcome the reappearance of our old friend in the genre. The puzzle is of crystalline transparency, and is one which has done yeoman service since the 'nineties ; if this sort of thing gets going we shall have priests seeking a precious gem stolen from a heathen temple back again. The strong point of this fragrant little yarn is its anthro- pological side: Miss Gypsy Rose Lee is an extremely handsome young woman who for many years won her daily bread and the admiration of thousands by removing her clothes garment by garment on the boards of the burlesque theatres of the United States. Burleycue lives by the strip, and raises any number of interesting points about social organisation and custom that we can't go into here ; it is only possible to say that the strip is near rockbottom in theatrical entertainment. The stripper only needs negative gifts, not to be deformed, not to be too ugly, and the performance itself—undressing—requires a minimum of intellectual process. The background provided by Miss Lee is passing strange, there is gen about the use of adhesive tape, monkey fur, and the subcutaneous injection of paraffin wax, that makes one stagger. The thing that detective story addicts might care to brood over is the relation of this murky theatrical pool to their own favourite literary wallow. Miss Lee is obviously intelligent and witty above the average ; what was she doing in this dim line? You, gentle addict of detective stories, have the whole magnificent pool of western literature to dip into, yet you mess into this nonsense of bogus logic, rigged detection, and near sadism? Yes, yes, to be sure— light recreation—looking over the titles at this review's head we have a couple of murders by a maniac on a matter of sex, a man with his head staved in, a corpse's face mutilated with a spade, the litter of female corpses in The Worsted Viper, the naked victim doubled up in a lavatory by Miss Lee . .. what fun, what recreation!. JOHN FAIREIELD.''
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