Palmer under fire
Sir: In what passes as a review but which is in fact a peevish " hatchet job," Tony Palmer takes more than a column to attack the author of Death Cap, June Thomson, for writing the book and ourselves for publishing it.
He says that Death Cap is "masquerading as a thriller." The book is a novel of detection and one thing that it transparently isn't is pretentious or disguised as something that it is not. In a review in the Times H. R. F. Keating states that the book "admirably avoids artificiality."
Mr Palmer asks: "And how many copies will such a work sell? 1500 at most?" Book Club Associates, a division of W. H. Smith and Doubleday, the American publishers, have made Death cap their May choice of the Mystery Guild and confidently expect their members (approximately 4,000) to enjoy the book, whilst our own edition of 2,500 we expect to be sold out within the year.
Nowhere in his " review " does Mr Palmer give his readers any inkling of what Mrs Thomson's book is about. He has spent his time and words in futile destruction. 1 trust Mrs Thomson will not heed the advice in Mr Palmer's penultimate sentence but instead remember The Times Literary Supplement review of Not one of us, her first novel (containing the same Police Inspector): " More engrossing than any whodunit aspects . . . is the relationship between Smith and Finch, the detective, in which each one discovers something about justice and compassion and freedom; and such discoveries, seriously made, belong to other literature than crime fiction."
Miles Huddles ton 10 Orange Street, London, WC2.
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