End of Chapter. By Nicholas Blake. (Collins, 12s. 6d.) Authors
must often imagine murder in a publisher's office—if only of a fellow-author.
Mr. Blake polishes off a horrible woman writer, very elegantly and readably as to his own prose, a little clever-cleverly as to dialogue ('written by career girls for veneer girls,' says one character of a kind of woman's magazine), and altogether very improbably as to character and motive. A Proust-reading general and a Firbank-quoting police inspector may be all very well, but not the retired circulation manager of a popular news- paper who remembers after thirty years, as a matter of course, the precise shade of a piece of porcelain. An amused sort of class-consciousness produces wafer-thin caricatures of the lower orders, and a stylist who fusses (rightly) about the distinction between 'disinterested' and 'un- interested' should mind that a journalist's by-line isn't a bye-line.
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