It's a Crime
10s. 6d.)
A Dying Fall. By Henry Wade. (Constable, 10s. 6d.) 'IT is DIFFICULT,' announces Sir Jon Nappleby in Murder in Pastiche, `to solve a case without a thorough knowledge of the classics of modern European literature.' After this shrewd hit at the detecting dons, Marion Mainwaring goes on to score neatly off the drawing-room school (represented by Miss Sliver, with her knit- ting, her quotations from Tennyson, and her discreet, reproving cough), the crossword puzzle school (Mallory King, whose cases 'always have some underlying pattern,' preferably a symbolic one), and the tough school (sharp-shooting Spike Bludgeon). These detectives, and their five colleagues—equally celebrated, and borrowed for the occasion from Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy Sayers, Erie Stanley Gardner and Rex Stout—are engaged in investigating the murder of an unlikeable American columnist, knocked on the head during a transatlantic voyage. Techniques of detection and narrative styles come in for some affectionate parody, and Miss Mainwaring has even contrived a plot that holds together none too badly in its own right. Although not one to be repeated, Murder in Pastiche is an audaciously brilliant perform- ance.
A story about missing diplomats or scientists now calls for something in the way of a new twist, and in The Man from the Sea Michael lnnes amiably provides it. He brings a delinquent physicist back from behind the Iron Curtain, lands him on a lonely Scottish beach at midnight, and charges an ingenuous young Cambridge graduate with the job of transporting him safely to London. Problem : are the fugitive's intentions as innocent as they appear? Mr. Innes elaborates this sort of thing with great verve; and the flight through the heather, with a small army of Communist agents laying ambushes all over the place, comes off spiritedly. The blend of the most innocent adventure with a formal and mannered prose style makes for an agreeably flavoured entertainment.
Crime in California is a serious business, and the lone detective, disenchanted and disillusioned, sniffing out the vice rackets and the graft in the little towns with Spanish names, has become a standard
hero since Raymond Chandler dignified him with the claim that 'he must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.' John Ross Macdonald has an eye for the seedy and the dilapidated, and is in full command of this particular idiom. The sharply-written Find a Victim, a tangled story of inbred small-town intrigue, achieves, along with some commendable suspense, the authentic note of acrid melancholy.
In Grand Prix Murder, the question of who doped the leading
driver of the Dayton team in the big Italian road race scarcely assumes paramount importance. No one, in fact, has time for any- thing but the most perfunctory investigations while the cars are circling the track at 100 miles an hour; and the advantage of this novel is that the pace seldom lets up. Schoolboyish and super- charged, Mr. Rutherford's story careers along to a slam-bang finish; it's a pity, though, that the crime which gives the whole affair its raison d'être should be so exceptionally unlikely.
Racing—steeplechasing this time—also features in A Dying Fall, although to a lesser extent than the dustjacket might lead one to expect. Poker-faced Captain Rathlyn's wealthy wife falls over the banisters at a moment most convenient to him, and a tough- minded CID superintendent sets out to prove him guilty of murder. Henry Wade can be relied on for workmanlike detection and authentic police backgrounds, but this variation on the theme of 'did she fall or was she pushed' develops somewhat lethargically. The policemen convince; the other characters perhaps come a little too directly from old English hunting prints. Vicars Bell also deals in rural crime, with quiet, bucolic charm thickly applied. In solving the mystery of how the unpopular farmer came to be outside the church door with his head bashed in, Dr. Baynes potters about the village, chats with the local poachers, attends a jumble sale, and is incongruously taken, Chicago style, for a ride. Death and the Night Watches is tranquil, unassuming and cheerfully old-fashioned.
The Coral Princess Murders, finally, finds Jean and Pat Abbott, Frances Crane's peripatetic detectives, caught up in the drug traffic in Tangier. The cast includes American expatriates, one heavily doped, a Moroccophile Russian prince, and an equivocal police inspector; altogether a fair formula thriller.
PENELOPE HOUSTON
Previous page
