Nameless Deeds
A Deed Without a Name. By Dorothy Bowers. (Hodder and Stoughton. 8s. 3d.) 7s. 6d.)
THE ingenious Mr. Carter Dickson deserves well of his public. His settings are often unusual, his characters always lively, with that touch of caricature which the detective fantasy demands. Moreover, he is an adept at dirty tricks. The action of his new novel takes place upon a liner sailing from America to England during the early months of the war, unconvoyed, with a cargo of munitions. This explosive atmosphere is heightened by the mystery of the passenger-list, which contains only eight names though it is known that there is a ninth passenger aboard. Murder duly takes place, followed by alartuns and excursions which may or may not be connected with lurking U-boats. Mr. Dickson keeps us on the jump throughout : he also propounds and answers an entirely novel conundrum—" When is a finger- print not a fingerprint?"
It is no reflection on Mr. Dickson's skill that Miss Ferrars walks off with the honours. Her first novel, Give a Corpse a Bad Name, had brilliant promise. Her second is so good that I feel safe in putting down her name as one of the detective novelists—they are not more than eight—whose forthcoming books I can always look forward to with the assurance of special enjoyment. In Remove the Bodies her forte of characterisation through dialogue is seen to particular advantage. The victim in detection novels is commonly no more than an unpopular or unconsidered body—a formal hypothesis for an argument in crime. But Miss Ferrars makes her Lou Capell an ordinary, silly, appealing girl, so alive even when she is dead that her story becomes a great deal more than an intelligence-teaser. Not that it is deficient in the conventional virtues of the detective plot : the plot is admirably controlled, full of surprises, developing naturally and easily, and sustaining its excitement without artificial injections.
Miss Bowers is another writer of skill and animation. A Deed Without a Name is not so convincing in background or tidy in construction as her Postscript to Poison: the red herrings are manipulated, rather than proceeding under their own steam; hut here again the victim's psychology has been carefully studied and is essential to the development of the plot. Archy Mitfold is an introspective, self-dramatising young man who keeps a diary : he has stumbled upon the secret of the disappearance of an American millionaire, and this diary becomes his doom. Not till we realise why he is always drawing little pictures of the Spotted Crake do we perceive the identity of his murdeter.
Murder at Lilac Cottage can be recommended only to th.,se who like the detection novel in which logic, rather than pason, spins the plot. Mr. Rhode is a master of the booby-trap, I he murder at a distance : so much so that, in his books, we auto- matically suspect anyone who is proved not to have been upon the scene of the crime. Murder at Lilac Cottage presents Inspector Waghom and the forbidding Professor Priestley wIth the murder of a mysterious and much gossiped-about in a country village. To the reader it gives a sound plot anj 3 useful hint about How to Grow One's Own Drugs. The moz.ve is unconvincing : at any rate, I myself would never murcle- a blackmailer till he had begun to blackmail me. The Chief Witness is quite one of Mr. Adams' best v.;.s. The characterisation is keener and more varied than this wr,ter usually gives us : the plot, which concerns two brothers who h .ce young man apparently committed suicide at the same moment in the s-Ile way in two different houses, arouses our curiosity at once. There is none of that tedious repetition and quartering of the ground which enables some of the older school of detection writers to last the distance. The Opera House Murders, a first novel, is designed to the formula of "a thrill on every page," and very nearly brings it off—that is, if you are prepared to have your feelings thoroughly harrowed and enjoy free fights where nothing is barred. There is more to this novel, however, than the rough stuff : the dialogue has a certain zip, and the thrills avoid
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