It's a Crime
1945, gives an explanation. Characters—a sulky adolescent with a taste for running away from home, a decayed Fascist intellectual, some assorted Scots—are plausibly established; the suspense builds up Promisingly for a hundred pages or so, until Miss McCloy gives the game away completely, before cheating us with a denouement which demands total suspension of belief. Thrillers set in the High- lands are routine; a crime story from Australia has its novelty value. w nh some rewriting of the gritty Australian slang, however, Have patience Delaney! might come straight from the Middle West; , am Singer is well drilled in the tough American mannerisms and his created, in Delaney, a detective as morosely charmless as any of his competitors. „The Wishful Think, according to Bernard Newman's publishers, Iln subject and plot surpasses anything he has done before": from re Point of view, the claim is justified. Mr. Newman provides ritain with a new secret weapon, in the form of a meek little clerk named Simmonds who telepathically forecasts the actions of the new Soviet leader, Granitev. After Simmonds meets Sir Winston Churchill (" 'Just one point,' Churchill mumbled, 'I think I shall let Attlee in on this' "), Adlai Stevenson, the new American president ("I shall ask Eisenhower to accept the London ambassadorship"), and others, poor Granitov doesn't stand a chance; nor, for that Matter, does Mr. Newman's fantasy.
PENELOPE HOUSTON
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