NEW FICTION

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29240, 25 June 1960, Page 3

NEW FICTION

A Winter’s Day. By Theodora Cooper. JPeter Davies. 223 pp. There is a quality of understanding in this quiet study •of human relations which is the hallmark of a good novel. Mrs Oliver, a strong-minded managing matriarch, has just died suddenly from a heart-attack, and the effect of her death on her over-cosseted husband and unmarried daughter, Harriet, who has been the not-too-willing slave of both of them, is the main theme of the story, though the three married daughters, their husbands and families provide a highly entertaining framework. Yet with all its comedy touches, tragedy is implicit in the situation. Harriet has twice been balked of matrimony by the selfish planning of her mother, and the sublime egotism of her youngest sister, Linda, who, in dallying with her first love and marrying her second has wrecked her chances of happiness in life. For this double disappointment, Harriet’s capacity for loving those near to her has suffered an irreparable blow. This makes her heedless of the fact that her schoolboy nephew! son of a pedantic father and an unimaginative mother, is beset by a burden too heavy for an adolescent to carry, and desperately needs her support against an uncomprehending world. His suicide so shocks her that she runs away from home, and perhaps the only mark of contrivance in the book is her almost accidental encounter with Linda’s husband’s mother. Otherwise the narrative flows easily, and gives us a composite and interesting picture of family life and strife. Honey For the Marshal. By E. H. Clements. Hodder and Stoughton. 192 pp.

Being a' secret service agent apparently covers a number of responsibilities quite outside ‘the ordinary official scope, and when Alister Woodhead arrives in England from his latest assignment he is blandly told to expect a week-end guest—one Marshal Bruno, head of a Communist State—with whom he had been personally acquainted during the war. As the marshal is known to be excessively unpopular in his own country it seems not unlikely that the vicinity of Woodhead’s comfortable house in, Sussex will be thick with furtive but bloodthirsty assassins. Consequently, when he repairs there to find his tender-hearted wife cherishing a household full of children (only three of whom are his own) all of them down with whoopingcough, he is, like Queen Victoria on a certain famous occasion, “not amused.” In the highly exciting pages which follow it seems certain that not only the marshal but Woodhead himself has been marked down for liquidation, and the final arrival of his guest (who, mercifully , perhaps, has not had whooping cough) sees him about to be committed to hospital with sundry evidences of mayhem inflicted on him by murderous assailants. This lively and amusing book has a most ingenious denouement.

One Spoilt Spring. By Beata Bishop. Faber. 256 pp.

By birth, Beata Bishop is a Hungarian; but she has lived for a number of years in Canada and Great Britain and writes in English. In the pages of “One Spoilt Spring” she brings to life at. a period of crisis the streets and squares of Budapest. Gitta Balogh and Marta Peterffy are just on the point of leaving their convent school when the book opens. The Russian army is approaching and Hungary is menaced with German occupation. The girls are drawn into political action in company with their friends Pali and Mihaly. Even before the Germans arrive, life for these four takes on the quality of a nightmare. With the occupation the pace is hectic—there are allied airmen to be smuggled away, Jews to be hidden from the Gestapo, ahd a secret radio transmitter to be kept going. Finally the Russians and Germans are fighting in the streets; but by this time Mihaly is dead and Pali hundreds of miles away. Gitta alone is left to express the indomitable spirit of Budapest and to look with hopefulness towards the future. “One Spoilt Spring” is written in a restrained style; but it creates an effect of considerable intensity in the reader’s mind. Lament of Four Brides. By Evelyn Berckman. Eyre and Spotl9l pp.

Melanie Baird, an antiquary of distinction, is offered the assignment of locating the hiding-place of a treasure said to have been buried 700 years earlier by the monks ofthe Abbey of St. Clotaire near Poitiers. The present owner of the ruins where her explorations are to take place is the wealthy Baron de Huber Lanthelme, and despite the siegneuriel courtesy of his welcome Melanie senses a tremendous tension in his household. After a few days she is imbued with the same feeling, especially when she plunges into the work of exploring the deserted Abbey with the desperately unwilling assistance of some of the Baron's dependants. Her host is politely helpful but when she repels his advances she virtually signs her - own death warrant, and the depths of perfidy in the young-old baron are foiled only by the agonised efforts of one of the victims of his tyrannous regime. This is a thriller of the month, and for suspense piled on suspense deserves its pre-eminence. Crime In Concrete. By Manning Coles. Hodder and Stoughton. 190 pp. For the twenty-third time in his career as secret service agent, Thomas Elphinstone Hambledon flirts with an unpleasant death; and a venturesome cat might well tweek an envious whisker at a man with such a multiplicity of charmed lives. Under the spell of Mr Coles’s pen, the reader hasn’t a dull moment from the time that Hambledon sets out to capture an elusive band of foreign crooks, known as the “D'Alroy Circus.” till the final exciting reckoning.