ALLEYN, PINKERTON, QUEEN, AND CO.

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22355, 19 March 1938, Page 20

ALLEYN, PINKERTON, QUEEN, AND CO.

NGAIO MARSH AGAIN

Artists in Crime. By Ngaio Marsh, Geoffrey Dies. 310 pp.

Having neatly dispatched his New Zealand holiday task, which made “Vintage Murder” Ngaio Marsh’s best book. Chief Detective-Inspector Alleyn is barely back in England and not yet back at Scotland Yard when murder beckons him to his duty. The murder of an artists’ model; murder in the class studio of Agatha Troy, with whom Alleyn has travelled on the voyage home and with whom he has fallen in love; murder done under her eyes and under the eyes of all the artists who form the little community she controls —of all except one, who has left, vaguely, on a walking tour; murder planned, if not by this missing sculptor, Garcia, then by one or more of the rest; for the way of the murder is that, when the model is posed, she is forced back on a dagger driven up from below through the floor-boards of the throne and concealed by a hanging drape—a way which has previously been proved possible by an experiment to settle a studio argument. . . . But when the search for Garcia at last succeeds it is a dead sculptor that Alleyn finds, terribly dead and terribly murdered. Get over the extreme artificiality of the first murder device, and you can whole-heartedly admire the cleverness of a close-drawn plot, the witty accents which distinguish the types of a studio group, and the surprise and shock of some Grand Guignol moments. Only pedantic time-keepers will wonder what has happened to the clock between pages 157 and 200. “Artists in Crime” is a lively and ingenious performance.

MURDER OF SOLLY SPAETH The Devil to Pay. By Ellery Queen. Victor Gollancz Ltd. 288 pp.

The present reviewer gave up reading the Ellery Queen detective stories after four or five: the smarm of dilettante culture was too thick and sticky. But he was wrong. He has probably missed four or five as good as “The Devil to Pay,” in which Ellery exhibits no lah-di-dah ways and writes no rococo prose. And as good as “The Devil to Pay” means very good indeed. 'Ellery was in Hollywood when the Ohippi crash came. Solly Spaeth had rigged a fine holding-company scheme round the Ohio-Mississippi hydro-electric works; then he quietly sold out his preference share holding through agents and was sitting on millions when the floods came down. They carried away the concrete and the machinery. They carried away all the shareholders’ money; and that included all the money of his own partner, Rhys Jardin. Solly was ripe for murder, then. But the awkward thing, when he was found murdered, was that Wally Spaeth, his son, was found close by and had been on the spot; and Wally, who had radical views and was, moreover, in love with Val Jardin, Rhys’s daughter, had insisted with furious threats that Solly must repay, must set the works going again, with the only result that Solly had with equal fury threatened to cut Wally out of his will. And then this poor Quixote, because of a notion he took, had to start lying Queen’s rescue work is brilliants,

Some Crime Stories

IN AT THE DEATH

The Guilt Is Plain. By David 'Frome. Longmans, Green and Co. 353 PP-

Mr Evan Pinkerton, the timid little Welshman who is forever stumbling upon murders and somehow, out of his blunders and misapprehensions and blind interferences, contributing to the solution and worked out by his patient friend and protector. Inspector Bull, is by now an established favourite, mid Mr Frome uses him, if anything, better and better. In “The Guilt Is Plain”—pretty title!—Mr Pinkerton’s first unpleasant experience comes in the Brighton Aquarium, when, as he is romantically watching a pair of lovers, a woman, an octopus of a woman, takes him for a private detective and frightens him with her threats. But this is only the prelude to the perplexities and horror of the following morning. In the famous Brighton Pavilion, among the gaudy and magnificent rooms, he is puzzled by queer encounters ahd queerer snatches of conversation, and at last pops into the Music Room, where he discovers an old lady, dead in her chair, the blood running from her throat, and the octopus woman of the Aquarium standing before her, knife in hand. Good enough; but it soon transpires that in the odd comings and .goings through tbe Pavilion that morning Mr Pinkerton has seen a virtual parade of this old Mrs Isom’s possible murderers —a husband kept short of money, a lawyer with something to hide, a scheming nurse, a parasitic friend, a niece in bondage, and a lover who would dare much to set her free —possible murderers, and much more likely ones than the octopus. This is an excellent story, the tension of which is not relaxed until Pinkerton himself escapes the murderer’s last attack.

INTRICATE TRIUMPH The Silver Sickle Case. By Lynn

Brock. Collins. 283 pp.

When the precise Mr Partington disappeared, Inspector Gully could see no evidence to lead him anywhere but-to the river and mighty labcur with grapples and drags. The Scotland Yard men who were called in picked up the clue of Mr Partington’s lost ring and followed it to the Southmouth rubbish tip, where they, found Mr Partington, with his head smashed in, buried deep. Looking for reasons why this harmless man should have been battered to death there, they grubbed up, after him, the body of a young woman, fearfully burnt with sulphuric acid; and when they had identified the remains as those of the pretty and popular nurse, Joanna Behennick, the case began to open and ramify. For Joanna had driven a thriving trade in illegal operations and blackmail. To say nothing of a mentally stunted sister at home and an eccentric neighbour With a bitter grievance, a wide circle of suspicion had its centre in the Silver Sickle night club outside Southmouth, where Joanna had last been seen and where, among those who had seen her last, were the richest of her victims and the one in greatest danger, this woman’s brother-in-law, who well knew the uses of the tip, and a chemist from whose storeroom the jar of undilute sulphuric had disappeared. Readers who have missed Mr Lynn Brock’s name on Crime Club covers in the last few years have excellent reason to welcome it again.

No other book setting out to assemble and interpret the facts of the European situation, the fads about the men in key positions* about the policies they frame and pursue, about the peoples they lead, has had so great a success as John Gunther’s. Since it was first published in 1936, it has gone through 24 impressions, 14 of the original edition, 10 of the new and revised editibh; and now the twenty-fifth impression of Inside Europe * (Hamish Hamilton. .536 pp. 12/6 net.) makes its appearance, throughout, _ extended by the addition of three ij new chapters and about 20,000 words j of new material in all, and iEus- ? trated with 24 photographs. The | book, enlarged as it is and brought | up to date, re-emphasises Mr Gunther’s qualities. He is an adept in describing character and relating it to policy and event; he keeps his material, voluminous as it is, in due proportion and lucid order; and he is a first-class reporter, who gives life to everything he touches.

THE BLACK CAT MURDERS The Case of the Frantic Ladies. By Leslie Floyd. George G. Hamp and Co. Ltd. 256 pp.

Anastasia Wayne, the frantic did lady who is supposed to tell this story, does it very vivaciously. The minders began when she and her friend, Mrs Davenport, went down to their country house and found one of the men who had been painting it, dead, on the library floor, with Beelzebub the black cat com-; fortably sitting on his chest. Beelzebub was on the scene when Francis, the chauffeur, was found dead also, and he sat licking his paws by MJsnr. the gardener’s wife, who was a thiro victim. But Beelzebub is not mueft more, though a little more, than a symbol for the supematurahsm which strongly pervades the atmosphere. Mrs Davenport was convinced that the truth could only be discovered by psychic means; and she imported the medium. Miss Ross, whose seances and psychometric readings are described without guy - , ing of any kind.' There was nothing , supernatural about these crimes m motive or method. But before botn were made plain and_ the killer trapped, the old ladies, nephew George, daughter Pat, and the mysterious reporter, Roberts, had many shocks fo go through. The alternation of thrills and humours will keep the most torpid reader awake.

THE PERFECT MURDER The Little Victims Play. By Anna Hocking. Geoffrey Bles. 286 P - This is a piece of work of a kind which Francis lies has carried to perfection; it shows how a murder was planned and carried out, with such thought and care that even the discovery of the facts could not endanger the murderer. Major Geoffrey Harden, who had great art in such affairs, laid siege to a rich but elderly woman, married her for her money, but indeed made her very happy. She died with her illusion of his goodness intact; she died, truly, to spare his heroic, unsemsn soul a long, distressing ordeal; but he had killed her. as surely as if he himself had forced down her threat the heavy dose of veronal wtuen she took voluntarily. Her sister had died mad, after an injury to her head; she was too ill-informea to know that this afforded no evidence of inheritable madness in her family, and, making a shameful secret of the matter, she lived m growing fear that her own nervmtf headaches preceded insanity. confessed her secret to Harden, however; and he used it to kill her. The book becomes a detective story only in its last phase, when the unfortunate woman’s niece and the doctor set to work to find the evir dence that indirectly at least bring retribution on Harden. lvu» Hocking has written s thrilling story, with touches of real pity ah® horror in it- '