ANOTHER WIFE POISONED

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 170, 20 July 1935, Page 2 (Supplement)

ANOTHER WIFE POISONED

A JURY'S REACTIONS. As if Mr. Ernest Raymond's study in wife-poisoning (reviewed last week) were not enough, another novel has now come to hand whose plot centres round the death of a wife by poison, and the trial of her husband, who is suspected of having murdered her. But it is not the crime itself, so much as the reactions of the member's of the jury to it, that is the main theme of Air. Gerald Bullett's "The Jury" (Dent). His book is consequently a much pleasanter one for the ordinary reader than Mr. Raymond's. When Daphne Strood is found dead in bed apparently poisoned by an overdose of a sleeping draught, suspicion certainly points pretty definitely at her husband Roderick, who lia's just eloped with an Austrian concert artist. Roderick is arrested at the boat-side and brought back to London for trial. What tbe result of that trial is, and what was the true storv of Daphne's death, is too well told by Mr. Bullett to be spoiled by telling here. The first part of the novel, The Twelve Converging," tells of Roderick and Daphne and the unhappiness which comes into tlieir life through Rodericks infatuation for Elisabeth Anderscli, and also picks up the lives of each of the jurors who are later to sit at the trial, and gives us a glimpse at each of them. In the second part, 'The .Twelve Listening," the trial is dramatically staged—all tbe evidence is placed before the jury and counsel's addresses and the judge's summing up are given but the reader has not yet been let into the secret of how Daphne really died, and is in no better position than the jury to decide upon Roderick's guilt or innocence. In "The Twelve Debating, tho third part, tbe novel describes tbe processes by which the members of the jury arrive at their verdict, and one concludes that their own experiences as shown for a moment in "The Twelve Converging," have as much to do with that verdict as the evidence itself. One wonders incidentally whether a New Zealand jury would tackle the problem of decision on a capital charge with as little regard to the actual evidence as was paid by Major I'orth and one 01 two of the other jurors. From a technical point of view much of this book is good. And every reader will find the main plot and its ultimate solution .extremely interestin" though perhaps the multitude of scenes in the first part of the book, where the jury arc "converging, are a little confusing. But this is a defect which the structure of the plot makes it impossible to avoid. Ihe last chapter, which discloses the secret of the plot, is wonderfully well done, and the pathetic touch with which Mr. Bullett brings down his curtain is masterly.