Death in the Idle Afternoon
The Iperess File, by Len Deighton (Hodder and Stoughton, 15s.), is a very fine thriller indeed with a beautiful air of authenticity, and I don't want anyone writing in to say that Secret Ser- vice work isn't like this. It's got to be like some-
thing, and this is what settle for. Locales are London, Lebanon and a Pacific atoll (guess why); chapter twenty-six is a brilliant revelation, and the ending is cunning and fearful. This is to be the first of a series; best wishes to the next one.
How nice, how cosy, how thoroughly relax- able to settle down with the new Agatha Christie, which is called The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (Crime Club, 15s.). You will almost weep for poor Miss Marple, sadly frail now, though no whit worse in the wits and as well able to cope with the newer problems of domestic service as with murder at the local film-star's home. Thoroughly recommended to those who like Miss Christie, despite the loose ends that uneasily vex afterwards.
I'm not going to pretend I understood what was going on in Kenneth O'Hara's Double Cross Purposes (Cassell, 15s.); understanding is for lawyers, Communists and games-theorists. But at my superficial level of perception this is a thriller about Them against Them in a nasty country, with Us somewhere and ineffectively in the middle. I thought rather well of it.
Good American detective writers tend to be very good at devising initial situations of ap- parently unravellable complexity, an appearance too often borne out by weak and unconvincing solutions. This is the case with Holly Roth's Operation Doctors (Hamish Hamilton, 15s.), a fine beginning with dead doctors abounding in
London and in a horrible German ship bound for the Far East, an interesting and attention- holding story and then a really poor and alto- gether unacceptable ending; more, there proves to be a major emotional cheat at the heart of the book.
Richard Deming's The Careful Man (W. H. Allen, 13s. 6d.) is also a bit of a cheat because the ending unjustifies his using a first-pers° narrator. But if that's let go by, this is a cull' ning and macabre bit of double-crossing con- ' work in American lonely-heart circles. Killer's Kiss, by Henry Kane (Boardman, 15s.), is an American book that traces an extremelY clever fraud and it's well worth reading. There's lots of sex, coarse, glamorous and moral, and perhaps a shade too many squashy details of the end-result of a jump, but an oddly cheerful nolc deodorises all.
Margot Neville writes better than she used to and Drop Dead (Bles, 13s. 6d.) presents a reason' able detective puzzle. Its lack, though it seems unkind to say this, is that of most Antipodean detection, that the characters are so undifferea- tiated and dull and so are their lives. To saY that the setting is middle-class Sydney is hardly to intrigue potential readers, and yet that's all one fairly can say.
Maurice Proctor's latest, A Body to SP, (Hutchinson, I5s.), is another workmanlike stor of crime in Grantchester with Chief Inspector Martineau the competent and realistic invest!, gating officer. As is fair in crime—though ro in detection—we know both sides, the tension being based on the closing-in and not on Oft puzzle. But isn't it time that Martineau g° something on Dixie Costello? Stop at the Red Light (Heinemann, 13s. 641),' by A. A. Fair, is one of Erle Stanley Gardner s Donald Lam and Bertha Cool stories, and irsta good cheerful fast one about an apPare:, simple insurance fraud that turns out—and .,:t will be surprised?—to have Ramifications. vl't the supine bikini'd blonde is doing on the1acker I can't fathom. Anyway, I liked this one beteg than the same author's non-pseudonymous Case of the Lucky Loser (Heinemann, 13s. 6u'ie which is really a bit too much of the mix°
as before. hat
Frank Gruber's gimmick is Attila the Hun, not, as we learn in the course of the book, wf barbarian. Indeed, we pick up quite a lot history in the course of Brothers of Sae.% (Boardman, 12s. 6d.), an engaging Amerre's, thriller that begins in a French Trappist mor1.3,,, tery, and chases rather unusual and excil treasure through the wilds of Middle Europe ail the machinations of Middle Europeans.
ESTHER
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