CRIME RATION

Press, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23349, 7 June 1941, Page 5

CRIME RATION

TWO GOOD (1) Death by Dynamite. By Joseph L. Bonney. Hinemann. 261 pp. (8/-). (ii) The French Key. By Frank Gruber. Robert Hale. 248 . pp. (8/-.) Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd. Mr Bonney's "psychological" detective,' Simon Rolfe, improves on acquaintance. His heavy styie' of talking is not the outward wear of a dull wit; and the scheme by which he traps .into self-betrayal the murderer of the twin brothers, Ross and Gerald Kelsey, and'saves the intended victim of a heartless frame-up, brings the last but entirely logical surprise of a story full of surprises. In "The French Key" Mr Gruber leads off with a bang. Johnny Fletcher and Sam Cragg, the brains and the beef of a book-agency partnership, were locked out cf their hotel room because their credit had run out. Making their way. in by the window, across the crevasse of an air-well, they found the bed occupied by a stranger. He was dead, newly and horribly. His hand clutched the rarest of American coins, the gold half-eagle of 1822, worth up to 20,000 dollars. The partnership swung over from literature to detection, and made an audacious and startling success of it. TWO BETTER (i) Hangman's Curfew. By Gladys Mitchell. Michael Joseph. 318 pp. (8/9.). (ii) Death and Mary Dazill. By Mary Fitt. Michael Joseph. 255 pp. (8/-.) Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd. These are excellent stories. Neither belongs to any of the conventional classes of detective fiction. Both are distinguished by delightful writing. Miss Mitchell's entertaining old macaw, Mrs Bradley, is put upon her mettle by the discovery that a- "case" in which her services are dirqetly and indirectly sought resembles a stagemanaged reconstruction of a 30-year-old murder mystery, unsolved. The sequel reveals the operations of a brilliant stage-manager, indeed, but in no harmless hoax. Murder follows murder, in a plot which Mrs Bradley can penetrate but not defeat, until it reaches its last phase, when her desperate business is to save, if she can, the unsuspecting, incredulous last victim. She does. She triumphs over the infamous Cousin Joshua, himself a pretty triumph in villainous characterisation. But before this happens the reader has enjoyed an ingenious treasure hunt with clues from old maps and the Oxford Book of Ballads, the flavour of Scottish and Yorkshire speech and climate, and the thrills of siege and battle. Miss Fitt's trio, Superintendent Mallett, Dr. Jones, and Dr. Fitzbrown, reappear in "Death and Mary Dazill," but their part is passive. They hear a story told: that which lies almost forgotten in the great tomb of Ralph de Boulter and his son Leonard, and in the neglected grave of Mary Dazill. They hear of the discord brought into Ralph de Boulter's house when Mary arrived, as governess to his daughters, Lindy and Arran; of his determination to marry her; of his children's opposition; of Leonard's death, it seemed by suicide; of Ralph's death, it seemed by accident; of Mary's, it seemed by illness. Strange, dark, puzzling, incomplete as it must be, they hear the vicar a wife tell the tale that lies behind the weekly attendance of Lindy and Arran. old women now. at their father's and their brother's tomb, without a for* giving step cr glance towards Marys, And they hear, otherwise, the secrets spoken, at last, which unlock the mystery of old, sad events. This is admirably done.