MURDER VARIETY

Press, Volume LXIX, Issue 21010, 11 November 1933, Page 15

MURDER VARIETY

. DEATH ON THE EXPRESS The Case of the Three Strange Faces. By Christopher Bush. Cassell. 314 pp. Through Whitcombe and Tombs .Ltd. Very, few detective stories reach higher levels than this. It is as logical and lucid in its own way as any story of Inspector French, for there is not a loose end anywhere. Second, logic and human nature are nowhere repugnant; Mr Bush's characters are quite human. Third, he earns these praises in a story which moves as fast as a thriller. Fourth, the old Scotland Yard war-horse, Superintendent Wharton, and his amateur assistant and friend, Ludovic Travers, as bodied forth, really do establish the right to live on from one book to another. And fifth, if it is worth mentioning nowadays, when prose is out of joint and (cursed spite!) no one but Kickbriclc's born to set it right, Mr Eush writes correctly and well, neither drably nor stiltedly. His story begins on a Continental train, in a carnage where Travers's interest is caught by tyrannical old Hunt, his meek and silly nephew Leslie; and Brown, the valet, who accepts outrageous jibes with unruffled calm; by Smith, the talkative hoiiday-maker, whose Riviera tan proves to be the product of a bottle of dye; by Olivet, the blusterous restauranteur; and by the Provencal outside in the corridor, to whom (or to whom else?) Smith in the middle of the night stealthily passes out Olivet's tremendous stick*. And in the morning, old Hunt is dead, transfixed with a hatpin, and Olivet dies, speechless and empurpled, on the platform at Marignac. Why did Smith disappear? Why did Leslie destroy the book he had been reading? Why did Brown, seeing Olivet so ill in the morning, suggest tonsilitis? What caused old Hunt's spots? And why was the peppery gentleman in the next compartment so inquisitive about them? There is no end of questions: but there is no end. also, of Wharton's—and Travers's—cleverness in pursuing and finding the answers.

EYEWITNESS Murder Up the Glen. By Colin Campbell. Rich and Cowan Ltd. 319 pp. ''Murder up the Glen" is an excellent detective story or detectivethriller; or it would be, but for two defects. The first is the very trying skittishness and jollity of much of the dialogue, especially all that expressing the tomboy, girlish affection of Cynthia or ' Sin" Neil for Lorin Weir, the second is the author's deliberate joggling of the lines of the solution, which the publishers, nevertheless, blandly declare "satisfies the most exacting expert in detective fiction," Tiiesc two reservations made, the story may be praised warmly. In the march of incident, from the time Lorin Weir sees the murder of Duncan Grant from his camp in Corrie Gorm to the time of the watching on the Waich, on the night of. Beltane, for ghost or murderer. Ihere is plenty to stir the blood: and a subtler appeal is in the evocation of the sight and scent and honour of the beautiful Highland country. GRANDMOTHER'S EDI CATION Tlic r.'Mk Myj-'ery. Ky 11. Lawrence T>h'Uip«i. Thomas Nelson and Sons I.td. 316 PP. "The Park Mystery" is bne of those rather irritating thrillers which generate no conviction. 'ihe important document is correctly haiiL.cd by uie faovei ian ambassador in rand to an atjeni who very prusums iL liiio uie secret pocket oi hi.i overcoa.., wnicn a j_>ritisn foreign Ultice man most happily grans in mistake tor his own, Uuuu! ne is clubbed in the train, but not before he has discovered his mistake and his mysterious cargo and posted the second, in an access of brilliant caution, to his brother in London. again! And, by what must really be described as an extraordinary coincidence, it is this brother who trous by in the park where Mr Pilkington has found the body—you would swear to it of the Soverian ambassador's agent. But you would swear to it too soon; for the Soverian ambassador's agent is seen alive in Paris alter Inspcctoi Freeman has nipped across the Channel to investigate his murder. Superlative ! But it won t do, any of it. Because the significant nods and winks and guarded confidences of the Men in the Know are so silly. Because Inspector Freeman, on the scene of the crime, talks as if his subordinates were novices and leadgts were morons:

Take the usual photographs of the room, and I want these glasses gone over carefully for finger-prints If you Set any results take them back to the Yard for comparison with our records. I The poor boobies might otherwise deliver them to the Archbishop of Canterbury for comparison with the bynoptic Gospels.! Murder has been done here, and I fancy two men are in it. Send someone to the Blackheath Hill Station, where you will find the murdered man, and see if any of your results correspond with his. And because, when the Cockney caretaker explains why the main door is not locked at night, his evidence is set down so: "We tried at once, but our folks kicked up such a shine about it that we was forced to leave it open All the sweets" iso he put it) is sepai ate, and the gentlemen said they didn t want to carry about no bloomin alldoor key . . . ■" "Sweets," so he put it. And how does Mr Fillips put it? CLEVER, BUT NO CLICK The Album. By Mary Roberts Rinchart. Casscll. 335 pp. Ihrougli Wliiicombe and Tombs Ltd. Undoubtedly Miss Rinehart's detective story, "The Album," is crammed with sensations and extremely ingenious. The five families living their backwater, repressed lives on the Crescent and suddenly plunged into the turbulence and terror of crimes that involve every one of them are very well drawn; and Miss Rinehart is very skilful in easing the tension with humour. But the ingenuity is of that elaborate kind which pulls probability out of shape ! and never quite reconciles dark horj ror with lucidity. To give more than | a hint or two would not be fair; but the attentive reader will find it hard to square psychology and deed—a disposition to murder in sudden violent rage and a very deliberate preparation to murder. Nor is it easy to excuse the author for a piece of engineering in which the headless body of a tall, thin woman is taken at once for that of the short, fat one in whose clothes it is dressed, and in which this short, fat one, dressed in those of the other, is allowed to be recognised by this other's description and to be thought "ladylike" in appearance. The logic fits no better than the skirts. -

I AVENGING SPIRITS From the Vasty Deep. By Mrs L. Belloc Lowndes. Eyre and Spottiswoode. 285 pp. (2/G net.) Although issued at reprint price in the publishers' London Mystery Stories series, this appears to be the first issue of Mrs Belloc Lowndes's very good thriller. It is a little ingenuous in manner, it very early discloses its certain end; but there is not a page of narrative which anyone would skip. The theme of a murderer's being implacably pursued by the spirits of his latest viclim and of his living enemy—spirits made visible by the meaiumistic power of the heroine —is original ancl is exploited without over-em-phasis of its sensational possibilities. One admirable feature of the storyis that the avenger who triumphs at last never appears in person.