SHOTS IN THE DARK Too Many Cooks. By Rex Stout.
(Crime Club. 7s. 6d.) Death in a White Tie. By Ngaio Marsh. (Geoffrey Bles. 7s. 6d.) Death in Five Boxes. By Carter Dickson. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.) Comes a Stranger. By E. R. Punshon. (Gollancz. 7s. 6d.) St. Peter's Finger. By Gladys Mitchell. (Michael Joseph. 7s. 6d.) The Chislehurst Mystery. By E. L. Mann. (Eyre and Spottis-
woode. 7s. 6d.) The Moor Fires Mystery. By Harriette Campbell. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.) The Case of the Michaelmas Goose. By Clifford Whiting. (Hodder and Stoughton. 7s. 6d.) This Path is Dangerous. By F. J. Whaley. (Robert Hale. 7s. 6d.) Crime of Violence. By Rufus King. (Methuen. 75. 6d.) Precious Company. By Jackson Budd. (Michael Joseph. 7s. 6d.)
THIS is certainly a bumper month for crime-books. The first seven on my list are all of high merit : I have placed Rex Stout and Ngaio Marsh at the top only because their detectives are admirably original characters and less well known to the public than Mrs. Bradley, Sergeant Bobby Owen and Sir Henry Merrivale.
We have had from America Philo Vance, Ellery queen, _
Asey Mayo and the charming hero of The Thin Man ; tg these we must now add Nero Wolfe and his wise-cracking assistant, Archie. Whatever we may think of Nero Wolfe's merits as an investigator, there is no question that he has personality—a quality rare enough among the detectives of fiction. A mountain of a man, a notable gourmet, lazy, given to Kai Lung-ish aphorism (" a hole in the ice offers-,peril only to those who go skating "), something of a misogynist, possessed of a strong moral sense and a ruthless manner iii the examination of suspects, Nero Wolfe went, I must admit; straight to my heart. The mise-en-scene of Too Many Cooks is no less original than its detective—a gathering of the ten most famous chefs in the world to discuss their art and test each other's palates. The chefs are a jealous and tempera- mental lot, so we are not surprised when one of them is found stabbed amongst his dishes. It is a little difficult to follow the movements of the suspects at the start : but this is the only criticism I have of a book whose dialogue is full of zip and where the reader will find recipes for such toothsome creations as Terrapin Maryland, Tennessee Opossum, Shad Roe Mousse Pocahontas, and (the dish that Nero was willing to detect murder for) Midnight Sausage.
Ngaio Marsh goes from strength to strength, and Inspector Roderick Alleyn is well on the way to becoming my favourite gentleman-detective. Unobtrusive, polite and efficient, he has none of Nero Wolfe's flamboyance, but he is no less severe upon the more disagreeable of his suspects : his inter- views with the witnesses in this case are quite exceptionally good, bringing out so many unsuspected facets of character that a certain weakness in the plot goes almost unnoticed. Alleyn is investigating blackmail in high society : blackmail leads to the murder of his friend " Bunchy " Gospell, a charming Edwardian gossip : one of the criminals is given us early, . and the other is thrown at our heads in a double-bluff that does not, I feel, really come off. The transformation scene at the end, which takes place in New Scotland Yard, is a bit difficult to credit : and my spies report that the All Souls blazer only exists in Miss Marsh's fertile imagination. Other- wise Death in a White Tie gets full marks. I am glad that Roderick lias _fixed it up. with Agatha Troy : detectives should either be happily married or, like their great exemplar Sherlock Holmes, not interested.
Death in Five Boxes is one of Mr. Dickson's best cases. He starts off with one of those apparently impossible situations at which he is so adept—four people sitting round a table in a room in Great Russell Street, three drugged with atropine and the fourth stabbed with a sword-stick. Not content with this, he allows us to find the most peculiar articles in their possession : Sir Denis Blystone has four watches in his pocket, Mr. Schumann parts of an alarm clock ditto, and Mrs. Sinclair quicklime and phosphorus in her bag. He then proceeds to solve this _knotty equation with easy logic, throwing in a passage with an air-pistol which will lift the startled reader several inches out of his chair. In Comes a Stranger Mr. Punshon reverts to that venerable crime- chestnut, the Body in the Library. Here, however, the library is even more important than the corpse, for it is a world-famous collection of manuscripts and first editions, and Mr. Punshon garnishes his crime with a wealth of biblio- graphy which adds to its fascination (I only wish it had been in the form of footnotes, for which I have an unhealthy craving). I thought Bobby Owen was slow in the uptake about the significance of the Milton ; and the murderer, whose alibi is exploded a bit late and perfunctorily, is more convincing as a psychological diagram than as flesh-and-blood. But this is a first-rate story, and the ciinflagration at the end makes a terrific climax. St. Peter's Finger opens very nicely with a young girl gassed in a convent. The scene enables Mrs. Bradley to exercise all her insidious charm and outrageous unconventionality, though she finds the passive resistance of the nuns a very hard nut to crack. The problem set the reader is an interesting one (a minor problem is to discover the relevance of some of the chapter-headings, which are of a fearful reconditeness), but I found it difficult to keep all the threads of the plot in my hand, and it does peter out a little towards the end : perhaps this is because the criminal's motive strained my credulity.
In the words of Julian Smith, part-hero of The Chislehurst Mystery, " we were to play through a detective serial, our clues thousands of years old, our scene the map of England, and our 'goal the dubious treasure." This was after the first clue had been found in. the prehistoric workings beneath Chislehurst, and after Julian, Jason and the girl Mavron had struck up partnership and had their first brush with the skeleton and the LaCkland Party. Harassed by the latter, who want the treasure for nefarious purposes of their own, our friends uncover the secret of the great earth-works of Britain and are led finally to an unbelievable fmd under Code Castle. Julian, as befits a schoolmaster, tells the tale with touches of agreeable pedantry, there is some excellent descriptive writing, and a swell romance to round it all off. An unusual and outstanding novel of adventure, this. The Moor Fires Mystery is another most intelligent- book : it might well have headed my list, only that it did not hold my attention throughout and I am not so fond of Lady Campbell's detective. It is concerned with the shooting of a financier .on a Scottish moor : most of the characters are exceptionally individual and well drawn, which shows up the one or two who come out of stock.
The Case of the Michaelmas Goose offers us a body which appears to have been thrown off a folly on the South Downs, some forgers, a detective who is a bully and vilely facetious, and a villain who reads The Times Literary Supplement. This Path is Dangerous deals with blackmail and murder in a small seaside settlement. The style is no end doughy at the start, but improves. One character, Mr. Trott, speaks with " baited breath," which is one way of describing the voice of the Sirens : and Mr. Trott is in at the death too. Crime of Violence is set in American high-life surroundings and the detective has a Sunday-school manner, which is not surprising considering the naïveté of the people he has to deal with. Precious Company, is the kind of thriller that is breathless with rhetorical questions and asterisks, that never uses one word where ten will do, in which one of the characters actually says " Hist ! " and the hero is caught in an open boat in a storm of such violence that the jib is sent ".scudding to windward." Can such things be?
NICHOLAS BLAKE.
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