DEAD, FOR A DUCAT!

Press, Volume LXX, Issue 21246, 18 August 1934, Page 17

DEAD, FOR A DUCAT!

The Mystery of the Cape Cod Players. By P. A. Taylor. Eyre and Spoilswoole. 287 pp. The Bell Is Answered. By Roffer East, W. Collins Sons and Co. Ltd. 253 PP. The Charge Is Murder. J. M. Spender. Eyre and Spotiswoode. 285 pp. In Asey Mayo, once a sailor, once a policeman, now a gentleman of leisure, Miss Taylor has invented a very taking "character" detective. It really is pleasant to listen to his Cape Cod idiom, his aphorisms and reflections; and the book is not without other amusing and likeable figures. Besides, the story is well managed. From the beginning, when a troupe of strolling players are given a night's refuge in Mrs Ballard's holiday cottage and she finds one of them shot dead next morning, suprising discovery and event and Asey's shrewd logic keep interest high right up to the dramatic close. Exacting critics will, because of a certain trick in the construction, put this book in the second class of detective stories: but there they will rate it at the top. Sina was living alone in a friend's house. She was having a bath. Her eye was caught by a bell-push close to her hand. Idly she pressed it, and the bell rang in the empty silence. But the bell was answered —by a personable young man, who said: "Did you ring, madam?" Fantastic, this, and Mr East sticks to his vein. A stranger who appeared under Sina's window, in the very early morning, and mowed the lawn. A wall papered with banknotes. A "book," the leaves of which were sections of sawblade. And so on. And nearby a young woman was murdered. One of her guests was Major Tommy Norman, whom Sina was thinking of marrying; near the body was found a knife lettered "5.C.8.," the initials of the young man who answered the bell, and whom Sina had come to favour, rather. But Mr East makes all the bizarre facts fit, and it is a brilliant surprise that he contrives when he slaps the last one into place. Mr Spender's story, after serial and book publication in Australia, is now issued for a wider public in England, and deserves to be well received. j