NOTHING BUT DEATH
7s. 6d.) The Bluff. By Herbert Adams. (Crime Club. 7s. 6d.)
A REGRETTABLE tendency has appeared recently in crime fiction. Within the last few months we have seen M. Poirot conniving at theft and Mrs. Bradley allowing a murderer to escape scot-free. Such high-handed behaviour, if permitted to continue, will lay the axe to the root, if not .a public morality, at least of the
laws of detective fiction. It is all the more reassuring, therefore, to note from the present series that this canker does not seem to be spreading. "But now I've gotten for my reward The gallows to be my share," sang poor Marie Hamilton : the same reward is meted out, with greater justice, to the diversity of criminals we are concerned with here.
The murderer is the weakest point of Mr. Brock's new novel : his motive and procedure are adequate enough, but he himself is rather a shadowy character in comparison with the full- blooded company in which he finds himself. This includes Venn and Kither, two Scotland Yard men who take the place of the author's famous Colonel Gore ; it is a bold thing to change detectives in mid-stream, but Mr. Brock amply justifies the move ; Venn and ICither are good sleuths, intelligent, natural and most painstaking, and make admirable foils for each other. The case opens with the theft of a camera, the arrest of the thief on the crowded beach at Soutlunouth, and the disappearance of a retired Civil Servant : it moves on to a municipal rubbish-dump, which is examined with extraordinary pertinacity by the detectives and described by the author with revolting fidelity (it will be some time before I shall be able to look .a municipal rubbish-dump in the face again) : and reaches its conclusion at the road-house from which the book gets its title. My only other criticisms of this excellent story are that its flow gets silted up in places under a superfluity of detail, that an occasional pause for recapitulating the evidence would have saved the reader several headaches, and that "any road" in the sense of " anyhow " is not Wessex dialect. For the rest, The Silver Sickle Case has all the qualities of an Edwardian country-house breakfast—meaty, various, leisurely and sustaining.
Artists in Crime is Miss Marsh's best, and I will eat my deer-stalker hat if she does not soon qualify for the next vacancy among the Big Ten of detective fiction. Her touch is light, without lapsing into the facetious ; her characterisation
excellent ; her plot neat and precise (though I suspect a flaw in the second murder : if A. wants to murder B., and finds that B. is himself a murderer, surely A. would wait for a bit to see if the hangman was not going to do his job for him). Above all, Miss Marsh has now acquired the most difficult art of keeping her story urgent and on the move, without scamping, or applying artificial respiration. Her police are very gentle- manly men—a shade too gentlemanly perhaps : Inspector Alleyn, with his aristocratic mother and exquisite sensibilities, is building up well with each case ; but I hope he will not model himself too much on Lord Peter Wimsey, for Lord Peter— unless I am much mistaken—is going to become a bore in his later middle-age ; and above all I hope that Alleyn will forget his good manners shortly and thrust a wedding-ring on Agatha Troy's finger and spare us a repetition of the Wimsey-Harriet marathon love-affair. Agatha is a painter. A model is murdered in her studio, in full view. of seven artists who are working there, and by a peculiarly bizarre device. Later, another artist is killed, in circumstances which will turn all but the strongest stomachs. Alleyn's interviews with these Bohemian folk are superbly done, and will give the reader just that sadistic thrill which such interviews in detective fiction are designed to give.
Mr. McGuire's book has several things in common with Miss Marsh's. The same type of humour and crisp attack ; a sophisticated setting ; characters skilfully built up. It lacks, however, her narrative ability : there is a patch about the middle of the book where the story has obviously lost its first wind and not found its second. An ageing singer is found dead on the first night of a night-club (W.I.) in which she is one of the part- ners. The suspects include Dr. Warner, the narrator ; a millionaire ; a nasty ballet-dancer (male) and a haughty but passé ballerina ;, an adventurer ; and a Left-Wing poet who drinks too much, has food-stains on his waistcoast, and has written a poem about aviators—however, the author assures us in his foreword that" the characters of this book, as the meanest intelligence will understand, have no relations whatsoever with real people, unless the author could be called a real person, which could be argued." Chief-Inspector Wittier is an engaging fellow, and makes great play with the Flying Squad towards the close of an exciting case, though not before two of his suspects have been croaked and thus cleared the board for his solution. Some of the dialogue here is a bit too lush for my taste, but otherwise I enjoyed the book very much.
Mr. Downing has pretty well obtained a monopoly of the Mexican murder-market. The Last Trumpet opens with the murder of a bull-fighter in that country (a glass is flashed in his eyes just as he is going in for the kill). It turns out that he is one of the witnesses in an action between the Mexican National Railways and Dr. Torday. Several other witnesses have been killed or attackede Hugh Remiert has to find out why they_ are always attAcked *bout Christmas-time, why left- handedness keeps cropping up so oddly, " and who is taking the name of the Meiican National Railways in vain. Dr. Torday offers him an orange-grove to solve the mystery, instead of the usual fee. Apart from the fact that the murderer works a very old gag quite early on in the book and will thus be easily recognisable to the initiated, The Last Trumpet lacks the atmosphere of horror and suspense which have informed the author's earlier stories. The Dead Don't Care I also found disappointing. Mr. Latimer has won a considerable reputation with his Headed for a Hearse, but his new book contains too many of the vices of the American school of detective-fiction. His detective, William Crane, is a sot— and, in spite of The Thin Man, incessant boozing is very much less stimulating in fiction than in real life. Besides this, the physique of the female characters is dwelt upon with monoton- ous insistence, the style is sheer soda-fountain, and the males are over-dressed—(" The Irishman looked fine in a Burma shade dinner-jacket, black trousers, a white silk shirt with a dark green bow tie, a dark green cummerbund and dark green silk hose."). The plot contains threatening letters, a kid- napping, and an exotic girl called Imago Paraguay : but its bones are so pickled in alcohol that not much detection gets done. When we discover, as in the first chapter. of Dead Man Control, a murdered millionaire in a locked room and his young wife facing him with a revolver out of which one shot has been fired, we can be quite sure that she is not the murderer. We can be equally sure that the police will not see eye to eye with us over this. So it took a great deal of trouble on the part of Katherine Kingston's true love, Philip Bray, and the New York Police Department, to find the real solution of the death of Fennimore Kingston and the mystery of the Kingston diamond. The police work in this tale is good— and so, apart from a tendency to melodrama, is the tale itself.
Mystery at Moor Street opens sensationally enough. Scot- land Yard receives a message telling the police to keep away from 25 Moor Street. As soon as Inspector Higgins arrives there, a taxi drives up and a dead man falls out of it : shortly after, another corpse is found in the house itself. Higgins follows up a clue which leads him, via a night-club, to a country zoo where he has a narrow escape. There is originality both in this clue and in the final explanation of the murders ; the police methods are interesting—particularly the tracing of a certain 'bus ticket. But Higgins himself is a frigid, unsym- pathetic character, too fond of scoring- off his subordinates ; and it remains a mystery why the crithinat was so obliging as to lead the police to the scene of his crimes. The Bluff is technically a less interesting piece of work, but will please the more unsophisticated reader. The Temple twins, famous at Wimbledon, decide, on the death of an uncle who has been financing them, to let "The Bluff "—a house on the Kentish coast which is all he has bequeathed them—and stay on there themselves as maids. The house is taken by art unpleasing man, .Bradley Weir. The girls find domes tie service a good deal more dramatic than it is usually given out to be. The fiancé of one of them is arrested for murder : their house is being used as a base for smuggling ; and the other twin ends up in the arms of Roger Bennion, the amateur detective who has been called in to dean things up. In The Case of the Constant God we relapse into the worst Americanese (" It was rather a stunning fall morning, and Jonathan Alden tapped a riding-crop against a leather boot, straddled his handsomely calved legs," &c.). Apart from this sort of thing, the plot—which deals with blackmail, suicide and murder in a high-hat family—is unconvincing. Here again the criminal leads the police to the seat of the crime, and justly gets a kick in the pants as a result. You either do or don't like Letnmy Caution—that Cagney-esque G-man celebrated in the writings of Mr. Cheyney. If you do like him, you will find him at the top of his form in Can Ladies Kill ?—talking his strangely attractive brand of Basic- American, kicking gangsters in the stomach, being tough with the dames, and. figuring _things out in his laborious yet shrewd manner _ Wanted for Murder presents us with the familiar situation of the unjustly-im- prisoned man escaping, then suspected of killing_ the man who originally " framed " him. The detection here is sketchy and spasmodic, but there are plenty of thrills and some agreeable
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