Going Too Far

Flowers for the Judge.-- By Margery Allingham. (Heinemann. 7s. 6c1.)

The Loss of the Jane Vosper.' By Freeman Wills Crofts. (Crime Club. 7s. 6d.)

Death At Breakfast. By John Rhode. (Crime Club., 7s. 6.d.) The Arabian Nights Murder.- By John Dickson Carr. (Bamish Hamilton. '78. 6d.) The Unicorn Murders. By Carter Dickson. , (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.) Murder at 28.10. By Newton Gayle. (Gollancz. 7s. 6c1.) The Cambridge Murders. By Adam Broome. (Bles. 7s. exi.) Murder Goes Fishing. By Theodore Pratt. (Selwyn and

Blount. 7s. 6d.)

THOUGH all of the first six novels under review are distinctly

above the average of detection-writing, Miss Allingham is awarded without hesitation this month's 0.M., or Order of Murder. Flowers for the Judge (an attractive but not too relevant title), by its sense of proportion and its all-round excellence, shows up each of its competitors as comparatively unbalanced—going, in one direction or another, too far. Miss Allingham has a really unusual talent for creating lov- able characters, and—what is more difficult—for the creation of thoroughly convincing unlovable .ones : the clerk, Rigget, is a case in point. She takes great pains with .her minor characters too : the charwoman, Mrs. Austin is a devilishly authentic blend of the kind intention and the ghoulish effect. The setting is beautifully done, an old-established publishers, one of whose directors has vanished into thin air within sight of two witnesses while another is found gassed in the firm's strong-room. Not the least of many original things about this book is the_ way the author makes her heroine, a chic, charming, beautiful creature, aetually deteriorate tinder the strain of tragedy. How intrepid—and how admirable) Miss Allingham's writing is humorous and supple : I found only one phrase to quarrel with." most stratas of society " ; she can suggest naked drama beneath the dress of sophistication, as witness the cigarette-end incident on p. 19; and she has the rare capacity of making a case-hardened reviewer catch his breath—the trap laid for the detective, Mr. Campion, is brilliantly horrifying. Albert Campion, by the way, can now consider himself elected to my highly exclusive club of Best Fiction-Detectives. The only flaw I found in this admirable book is the motive. Was it really strong enough ?

Mr. Crofts' new book is excellent too. The loss at sea of the' Jane Vesper,' holed by mysterious explosions in the cargo, is so vividly described, indeed, that the sequel scents a little flat : compare the Board of Trade inquiry with Miss Allingham's Old Bailey scene. Mr. Crofts' construction is alWays first-rate ; one clue neatly explodes the next, and the whole plot moves like a rocket-car. Inspector French is up against the most teasing problem of his career: the first clue is not found till page 183, some time after the private detective of an insurance company is missing, presumed killed, and in consequence the main action seems slow in getting under way. One avenue is surely left unexplored too long, but otherwise there arc no technical flaws. For the pure-detection fan this book will be first choice, but I cannot help feeling that the author relies too much on pure detection. If Mr. Crofts over- steps the mark slightly in this direction, Mr. Rhode puts both

feet far over it. Some attempt is made to establish the character of the victim,, but the remaining dramatis personae'

are stuffed men. The whole book; in fact, like the Victorian female figure, suffers from an excess of padding that must render it to modern eyes as dowdy as it is voluminous: Mr. Rhode is unfailingly ingenious with his lethal weapons : but once we know that Victor Harleston has been poisoned through the razor-cut, and not by the pints of nicotine that are lying about the house in tea-pots and scent-bottles, our interest is no longer engaged. Superintendent Hanslct is quite unusually bone-headed ; surely no policeman would be taken in by the flagrantly bogus series of clues which. he criminal tosses'up to him. And never amongst my extensive professorial acquaint-

ance have I come across one who talks like Professor Priestley, ' a sample of whose conversation I append : " But- were 1 a member of the jury empanelled for the -trial, ,I would not conscientiously give an opinion in favour of his guilt 'upon the evidence which you have adduced."

One of' those intellectual parlour-games recently in vogue consisted in the proposing of a number of wildly dissimilar phenomena and relating them through a plausible narrative.

Let us take, for example, a museum : on its wall a gentleman is found sitting-clad in a top-hat and false whiskeraT somebody has thrown a lump of coal at one of-the inner Walls ; 'within also are discovered- an attendant tap-dancing at midnight round a mummy-case, two more pairs of false whiskers, and a corpse clutching a- cookery-book in its hand. Such,.believe it or not, is the situation with which Mr. Carr opens his new book. Mr. Carr could not be unreadable if he tried. But this time I feel he has gone too far. Dr. ;Illingworth and Sir Herbert Armstrong are figures of too much fun ; you will-cer- tainly split your sides over-them ; but the book rather cracks up in the process. The Unicorn Murders is equally readable, and equally damaged by excess. Here the excess is not of comic exuberance -but -of factual complication: The *pealing situation presents a man killed in a Marseilles street by something that has left a wound disagreeably suggestive -of a unicorn's horn, and a young woman solemnly greeting' a friend in a Paris café with the first two lines of " The Lion and the Unicorn." That is good. Better stilLis the position where a number of _people are flood-bound in a castle on the Loire, knowing that the notorious murderer, Flamande, and his famous adversary, Gasquet, are present in disguise, but not knowing the identity of either the criminal. or the detective. At this point, however, the story, begins to be overloaded with coincidence and further confusion . of identities. For those *fro- suspect that J. Dickson Carr and Carter Dickson arc one and the same writer, more circum- stantial evidence is now forthcoming : (1) the growing family likeness between Dr. Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale ; (2) the paradoxical opening gambits of the Arabian Nights Murder and the Unicorn Murders ; (3) the fact-that in both these books the unusual phrase " you overgrown gnome " appears. By the way, Sir Henry, "Quocumque aspicio, nihil est pontes et aer" is not correctly quoted. Mr. Dickson obtains concentration of activity by beleaguering his characters in a flood : Mr. Newton Gayle pegs his down even more effectually—they are all shut up in a house on Puerto Rico by the worst hurricane that this afflicted island has ever known. The island has been afflicted too, it seems, by the exploitation of reactionary capitalists. Otto Wallington, a New Deal politician, who is trying to improve conditions, is discovered badly wounded on the dunes and got into the house just before the hurricane begins. After that, James Greer, and Dick Piper have the time of their lives trying to keep the hurricane out of the house and the would-be murderer out of Wallington's bedroom. One might ask why, knowing that ' the murderer was one of the house party, James Greer did not confine them all to one room till the danger was past. Otherwise, the plot is neat and reasonable. Mr. Gayle's style is on the whole good ; he is not free from the American itch to overwrite, but it is difficult to over-

write , a hurricane. -.

It is a far cry, as they4ay, from-Puerto Rico to Cambridge. And a very odd Cambridge when one gets there, if we are to believe Mr. Adam Broome. The fact that a Professor begins lecturing " to the accompaniment of a hundred pens and pencils scratching over the surface of as many note-books " suggests to me that Adam Broome hails from Girton. Be that as it may, two West African students are shot, and an extraordinary pseudo-Gothic or Late-Temperance-Tract style of verbal architecture is maintained throughout. For anyone who wants a novel view of swamp life in West Africa and East Anglia, this book is a snip. Mr. Pratt is a newcomer to detec- tion. lie has invented a very bright murder-method. As he says, " When a man catches a fish, that isn't news ; but when a fish catches a man, that is news." There is some genuinely exciting stuff here, especially the big-game fishing at the end. But Mr. Pratt lays himself open to severe criticism on the following counts ; (1) The exposure reveals too many clues not adequately brought out before ; e.g., the secret passage ; (2) if one brings in a Communist, one should be able- to put at least the stock Marxist arginnents in his mouth ; (3) English ! sentences of this sort just mill not do : " He was th-. single mourner who demonstrated for the dead. After his lone salt was spilled . . ."

" By not telling is what you say may make it worse for Leslie than it actually is."

"This traumata became a phobia with him."

The traumata inflicted on the English language by writers arc indeed becoming a phobia with this reviewer. . NienoLts BLAEr...