CRIME

Press, Volume LXXXV, Issue 25935, 15 October 1949, Page 3

CRIME

THE OLD GANG Jimmy Wagstaff is assisted once more by Dr. Priestley in John Rhode’s UP THE GARDEN PATH (Geoffrey Bles. 192 pp.), this time to solve the problem of the two apparently unrelated murders in Gabriel Hockliffe’s garden: and the lest of the old gang —Hanslet, Harold, Oldland—are welcome members of the tidying-up party. The motives are more puzzling than the mechanics of the plot. TRAITORS AND SPIES

Evan John’s THE NETWORK (William Heinemann. 195 pp.) is a wellstrung story of systematic espionage and treachery. “Just a novel”? But it is based on the revelations of the Canadian Royal Commission of 1946; in effect, it is a dramatic translation of the report. The sub-title is the telling one. “It Could Happen Here.”

A new Jim Steele mystery, Dana Chambers’s THE LAST SECRET (Robert Hale. 253 pp.) crams with thrills the few days between Jim’s war-time interview with Alvin Harmon, master of the atom, and his exposure of the traitor who murdered Alvin for his secret and would have sold it to the Nazis. In between, they stage the great bluff that they have it already, and Jim exposes that too. Quite a character, this Jim. QUICK AND DEAD

Arthur Guirdham makes a high-ten-sion affair of his I—A STRANGER (Quality Press. 259 pp.), in which exiles from a country in the hands of a ruthless Power devote themselves to the Cause of revenge and the method of assassination; but love does more to heighten the tension than revenge does, and living bodies more than dead ones