Detection
Spottiswoode. 93. 6d.) TAKING the best English detective-novel characters as being of the intelligent upper middle classes with no tendency to other than the most " subtile violence," and the best American as those with a wealth of esoteric lore, what could be nicer than to enjoy the hest people of both worlds in Through a Glass Darkly which is, as it happens, American, but could well have been engendered here. The locale is a fashionable girl's-boarding-school, the detective a pleasant unmannered psychiatrist, and the mystery hinges on the original and completely unguessable set-up of a neurotic young teacher with a doppelgiinger. Clues are completely fair, which means that you recognise them when they come but haven't an inkling what to deduce from them; all the characters are credible and interesting ; and at the end of the book an intelligent reader's guide to doppelgangers has been completed. Miss McCloy is definitely the best :later. The Sleeping House Party, of a completely different order, is also excellent in its own bouncing original way. It is told in the first person by a jolly, not very bright, Australian girl whose personal reactions enliven and confuse a fair and unguessable murder in a toney beach colony outside Sydney. The detectives are police and none the worse for that, and the whole thing combines a high level of detection with a rollicking cheerful narrative style. If Miss Lambert can keep It up, she will develop a nice little corner all her own.
Agatha Christies I judge on whether I can guess them or not, and lately I've found I can, which suggests that Mrs. Christie, unbeatable when she takes pains, is getting careless. They Came to Baghdad isn't really detection but a Hannay-type thriller with clues, :Ind, read as such, it's exciting good fun ; but with first-class detec- tive fiction so rare, it always seems a shame when masters of the craft descend from the heights. This, by the way, is not a Poirot.
The Case Against Myself, a title not noticeably relevant to the plot, is American, and based on the now familiar pattern of thoughts and reactions at a trial. When most of the major characters are dislikable, the detection has to be exceptionally good, and in this story of the death of a columnist's mistress it is no more than conventionally adequate, built up by successive discoveries rather than deduced from available evidence. Perfectly readable and unmemorable.
If Thomas Muir is really accurate on the compound he has chosen for his murder-weapon in Death Without Question, he has at last found the perfect poison, one that induces a recognisable uncurable disease, leaves no post-mortem trace, and can be bought without signing a poisons-book. All this in a very workmanlike novel about death in an English seaside town with a biologist detective and suspicion fairly divided between thoroughly credible If not very interesting characters.
Meat for Murder has one of those Pacific Coast settings so fantastic in itself that murder hardly surprises, which leads to the generalisation that murder has its most potent impact when the surroundings arc least attuned to it. The whole thing is well over or the melodramatic side, and the detection is probably the dullest aspect of a riot of improbable violence.
Death in Four Colours is again American, but less pretentious and more successful than the last. The murderee is the art-editor of a New York magazine, and a lot of the unravelment depends on coming to understand the processes of magazine illustration— how interestingly detective-fiction expands our stock of know- ledge ! You're not expected to believe a word of it, but it's corn- pllcated, exciting, fair and enjoyable with some nice suggestions for caStial clothes and studio decor.
!Our last, The Murder of a Red Haired Man, is a near American equivalent to the Agatha Christie, a little straight detection com- bined with a really good original adventure story, set partly in Washington but mostly in a strange isolated hamlet in Florida. The heroine, a quiet thoughtful girl who has, when the story starts, never left this fantastic dump, is a pleasant change from the usual
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