It's a Crime
BEAST IN VIEW. By Margaret Millar. (Gollancz, 10s. 6d.) DEATH LIKES IT HOT. By Edgar Box. (Heinemann, 10s. 6d.) Asic A POLICEMAN. By E. C. R. Lorac. (Crime Club, 10s. 6d.) A SUGGESTION of an unpredictable menace lurking behind the commonplace is invariably one of the thriller's strongest cards. Graham Greene has played it in his entertainments; Hitchcock in his films of the Thirties, where elderly charwomen whip revolvers from their respectable handbags, and secret agents meet in the back rooms of suburban cinemas to plot bomb outrages. Accurately described by the publishers as a 'fantastic thriller,' The Body Snatchers yields some sufficiently tangible horrors. It is from a more subtly disquieting suggestion of the disruption of the ordinary, however, that this novel derives its uncommon degree of tension. The scene is a sleepy little Californian town, the central character its young doctor, who concludes that he has a case of mass hysteria on his hands when half a dozen patients protest to him that their relations, although still looking and behaving precisely as usual, are no longer in fact the same people. The explanation—not that Mr. Dennis's Identity Club has been in action, but that the village has been visited by an exceptionally odd form of life from outer space—leads into a chase story which ingeniously fuses suspense shocker and Wellsian fantasy. Mr. Finney may seem on occasion to be forcing the pace rather blatantly, but his description of the quiet surrender' of the little town to the invaders is chillingly persuasive. Sharply written and with an air of nightmarish plausibility about it, this is a thriller that grips all the way.
It's Different in July pursues another order of fantasy, and opens on a note of agreeable extravagance. Police investigators, sent to the Shropshire village of Herbal Street to inquire into a series of baffling disappearances, promptly disappear themselves; there are allusions to 'witches and warlocks,' suggestions that the women of Herbal Street are involved in criminal conspiracy on the grandest scale. Such, in fact, is the case; and although the actual methods of this sort of Women's Institute of crime (eleven hundred members in Leeds, six hundred in Manchester) may strike one as a trifle old-fashioned, the idea itself has a sinister charm.
With Beast in View we are back in California, in the territory of the psychological suspense story. A lonely, nervous heiress receives a frightening and mysterious telephone call and persuades a friend to track down the caller; and further malice over the telephone prepares the way for murder, suicide and the final dis- integration of the split personality that has been disturbingly at work. The problem of just who is persecuting whom doesn't greatly exercise the intelligence : this is primarily a study in the tensions of mental breakdown, and as such is engineered with slightly repellent ingenuity.
Meanwhile, the wry and disenchanted moralist, the folk-hero of Chandlertown, remains good value. Steve Summers, the private detective of The Pawns of Fear, is a civilised member of the tribe; and his latest case, involving the affairs of a witch-hunting organisation whose parade of anti-Communism has some predictably double-edged motives behind it, builds up into some- thing satisfactorily complex.
In Death Likes It Hot, murder interrupts a house party on Long Island, interfering with the schemes of a hostess who is endeavour- ing to entertain her way into the Social Register. Narration is in the hands of an imperturbably amiable amateur detective, and death in the morning, interrogation in the afternoon and the Yacht Club dance in the evening proceed to a fairly constant accompani- ment of bright, crackling dialogue. Plot motivation appears decidedly shaky, but the relaxed urbanity of Mr. Box's writing ensures a smooth surface polish. For an authentic glossy finish, Hollywood-type, however, The Man With Two Wives would be hard to beat. The mystery, concerning the shooting of a quarrel- some, alcoholic young Greenwich Village novelist, is one of the chain-reaction affairs in which Patrick Quentin specialises, and the highly-charged style takes it along at a driving pace.
Not to be confused with Mr. Quentin's novel is The Man With Two Ties, a murder story set in a South African diamond-mining settlement where all employees are regarded—not, as it develops, without some justification—as potential smugglers. Background detail here has considerable verisimilitude, and the action is vigorous and entertaining. Lastly, as an antidote to a diet of too much crime and too little detection, there is E. C. R. Lorac's pleasantly traditional Ask a Policeman. Superintendent Macdonald reliably investigates the case of a disappearing journalist, and the ending produces an authentic surprise. PENELOPE HOUSTON
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