DETECTIVE FICTION

By NICHOLAS- BLAKE To Wake tfie Dead. By John Dickson Carr. (Hamish Hamilton.

7s. 6d.) Death on the Nile. By Agatha Christie. (Crime Club. 7s. 6d.) Come Away, Death. By Gladys Mitchell. (Michael Joseph.

8s. 6d.) The High Sheriff. By Henry Wade. (Constable. 7s. 6d.) No Mourning in the Family. By "R. Philmore. (Crime Club.

7s. 6d.) Death Fungus. By Warner Allen. (Constable. 7s. 6d.) Unseen. By Albert Payson Terhune. (Harpers. 7s. 6d.)

RETURNING to the detection-novel after an enforced abstinence of nearly two years, as it might be an explorer returning to

civilisation from a solitary winter beneath Arctic snows, one tends to greet old friends, familiar faces a shade too effusively : " dear old so-and-so," one exclaims, " why, he hasn't changed at all." And here, chaps, are three of the best : dear old Poirot, a wizard if ever there was one ; dear old Doctor Fell, with his wheezings, his remarkable hat and his Chestertonian paradox ; and that charming if unscrupulous alligator, Mrs. Bradley. And they haven't changed at all.

It is gratifying that this should be so : yet perhaps a slight disappointment clouds the happy reunion ; we feel that the passage of time ought to have left some mark on these faces.

Sherlock Holmes, now—with every new case, almost, his character subtly developed ; we were constantly discovering in

him unexpected traits, new details to add to the dossier. Com- pared with him, even Dr. Fell, Poirot and Mrs. Bradley present too much of a static and Tussaud timelessness.

Dr. Fell's new case, like most of his previous ones, is a fancy-dress affair. A man is murdered in a country house ; his wife is found dead a few days later in a London hotel : on each occasion a figure in the uniform of a hotel attendant has been seen in the vicinity of the crime. What, we may well ask, was a hotel attendant doing in a Sussex country house ? Other curious and interesting questions begin to pose themselves. Why did the murderer leave a card outside the door, inscribed " Do Not Disturb. Dead Woman " ? Why was the pair of shoes not a pair ? Why were the faces of the victims bashed in, but no other attempt made to conceal their identity ? What was the point of the bracelet inscribed with a line from Virgil ?—as Dr. Fell remarks, once we see the point of this, we find the criminal ; but it is rather too recondite a one for so much to hinge upon. I should advise the reader not to rack his brains about the bracelet, but to

pay serious attention to the cabin trunk. To Wake the Dead is not a flawless book : but it contains one excellent character —Sir Gyles Gay, and it demonstrates once again Mr. Carr's uncanny skill at blending the normal with the bizarre, the real with the impossible.

Linnet Doyle, a beautiful heiress, goes for her honeymoon to Egypt. By a somewhat liberal use of coincidence, Mrs.

Christie gets Linnet and her husband on to a river steamer in company with a number of people who wish her no good at all. First and foremost is Jacqueline, the girl who was engaged to Simon Doyle until Linnet stole him away : she has been following the less and less happy pair around since their wedding, a moving monument to their perfidy ; Mrs.

Christie makes good play with this unnerving but not illegal form of persecution. When Linnet is shot, Jacqueline inevitably becomes first suspect : but on this boat, as Poirot and Colonel Race soon discover, you cannot throw a deck- quoit without hitting someone who cherishes a guilty secret.

Death on the Nile is not up to its author's best level : there's too much coincidence ; also, I doubt if one could really work the red-ink business with any certainty of success. However, there's a very hot alibi ; and Mrs. Christie's denouement, as usual, plays us all for suckers.

From Egypt we proceed to Greece, where Miss Mitchell has evidently been spending a holiday. From the point of view of

detection, Come Away, Death is almost perfunctory. The

murderee does not get his till three-quarters way through the book : but we are in no doubt who he is going to be—he is bashed in succession by almost all the other characters, and rightly. Nor, I feel, do we get really enough material to find out the murderer. The action is very hilarious and confused, reminding one of O.T.C. night-manoeuvres or those time-worn copies of early Russian films in which everything seems to be happening either in blinding sunlight or at midnight in a coal- cellar. But what else could one expect when a romantic classical scholar like Sir Rudri Hopkinson leads a party round Eleusis, Epidaurus, Mycenae and Ephesus, hoping to conjure up the Greek deities by re-enacting their ceremonial ? Still, the fun is so diverting—particularly the escapades and dialogue of the three small boys—that I can easily forgive Miss Mitchell for treating murder so flippantly.

In The High Sheriff Mr. Wade turns from pure detection to the novel of character with a crime motif. The turn, to my mind, is not for the better : but that may be because I don't care for hunting and shooting, which play a large part in the book, and because I found the hero, Sir Robert D'Arcy, rather a stick.. I could not, therefore, feel much sympathy for this upright, rigid man when he is blackmailed by an ex-officer who claims to have witnessed a piece of cowardice on Robert's part during the War—cowardice from whose humiliation Robert ha only just recovered. At any rate, the blackmailer gets killed at a shoot on .Robert's estate and we have already seen Robert trying to kill him on the hunting-field. The subsequent police work, as in all Mr. Wade's novels, is excellent. I wish Sir Robert D'Arcy hadn't stuck in my gizzard so : perhaps it means he is a successful character after all.

No Mourning in the Family is the first of Mr. Philmore's books I have read. His detectives, amateur and professional, are friendly chaps ; his style has an unemphatic, almost lacka- daisical quality which I like ; his characters are lively 'and up- to-the-minute. As the title suggests, this story describes the reactions of a family to the murder of its unlamented father. Samson Farrar's three children are a repressed, nervy lot ; and, when it becomes more and more evident that one of them did the killing, hysteria is bound to rear its ugly head. The book drags in the middle, but works up to a good climax—all the better for being quite untheatrical.

If Mr. Philmore's material is rather thin, Mr. Allen's errs on the side of congestion. Death Fungus—" le champignon qui tue "—opens with a political murder in France. Having shot the Prime Minister, Madame D'Arblay—wife of the leader of the Opposition—is acquitted, only to fall victim to mushroom-poisoning : later, her husband and his secretary die in the same way. Carteret, an ex-journalist, who has been investigating the leakage of political secrets on behalf of D'Arblay,- has picked the mushrooms by which Madame D'Arblay has been killed, so he is deeply interested in the elucidation of the -mystery. There -is good material in this book, and plenty of humour ; but the plot is too complex• for my taste.

The last three books on the list are thrillers, and they do not answer the question—Where are the successors to the old masters of this mode, to Boothby, to the earlier Sax Rohmer; to Wallace, to Buchan ? While detective-fiction is constantly- trying to blaze- new trails, the thriller seems content with already-conditioned reflexes or to ape the American school. Unseen, though its action is laid in New Jersey, is thoroughly British : the women are womanly, the men are muscular; and there is a dog which knows but cannot tell. The plot centres in a sanatorium for nervous cases (" Was it man or demon who spied at the laboratory window ? ") : otherwise conventional, this book has one bright moment—when Titus Lench, bee-keeper and recluse, defends himself from his assailants by loosing his bees at them. Gun Cotton in Mexico is about a troglodyte megalomaniac, but otherwise runs to pattern : nameless orgies are adumbrated, but alas Gun Cotton rescues the beautiful dancer in the nick of time. You Can't Hit a Woman is a collection of short stories, very much below the standard of the author's Lemmy Caution adventures : some of the tales take after. Runyon' others after Oppenheim, but neither do their progenitors much credit.