It's a Crime
The Cold Dark Night. By Sarah Gainham. (Arthur Barker, 12s. 6d.) That admirable first novel, Time Right Deadly, which was about occupied Vienna, is here followed by an equally evocative thriller set in the ice-bound Berlin of 1954. One staggering implausibility—even news- papermen would hardly leave a colleague's corpse in situ, without notifying the police, so as not to he late for dinner—though it damages the plot, does not impair the remarkable atmosphere con- veyed of the one city that the Iron Curtain goes right through, as it does through the very lives of so many of its tough, sardonic citizens. Miss Gainham bases her thrillers as firmly on the political realities of the post-war world as Eric Ambler did his best and earliest ones on that of Mussolini.
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