FROM THE CRIMINAL RECORD

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32775, 27 November 1971, Page 10

FROM THE CRIMINAL RECORD

The Corpse Bird Cries. By Olive Norton. Cassell. 154 pp. In the village of Trellwyd in North Wales the screeching of an owl was believed to be a foreteller of death, and shortly after Robin Gillan arrived to stay with his sister and her husband, who .ran a small boarding school there, the owl was heard a screeching. Robin had been .playing the part of a detective in a television series, something along the lines of “Z Cars,” and wanted some time off for he was getting stale and feared that he was becoming too much of a set type of actor. The local policeman, Meurig Probert, was a friend of long .standing, and when a girl called Sarah, who for a few days had been the only girl at the small school for boys, disappeared and was later found murdered, Robin was soon helping his friend and following the same sort of investigations familiar to him in his screen personality. Robin was, himself, not entirely free from suspicion, for he had met Sarah on his way to Trellwyd and had given her a lift in his car. This strangely enough, he did not mention, and he was the last person known to have seen Sarah before she disappeared. However, the suspicion was never very serious and the investigations generally hold the main interest. Graduafly it appears that the tragedy which seemed to have happened in the village merely because the victim happened to be there at the time, is woven very closely into the fabric of life in the village. This is done skilfully and sympathetically, and Miss Norton creates and handles her characters deftly and convincingly.

ThJvictlms. By John Rossiter. Cassell. '3OB pp.

The author was formerly a Detective Chief Inspector of the C.I.D. and in this gripping and well-planned story he shows how some restrictions can

hamper a. Straightforward police inves-tigation-and. allow a known criminal to escape Conviction. He tells here of the death bf a girl of . sixteen by strangulation. It was not difficult for Detective Superintendent Bernard Kegan to find her murderer, a nine-teen-year-oldyouth named Paul Biancardi, whose older brother, George, was a prominent gangster and thug, although' he was a legless cripple. Kegan took Paul to a police station tor investigation. Despite denials, Paul’s guilt seemed well established when a search of his car revealed the girl’s hand-bag, and he was identified at a parade by a man who saw him, the girl, and his car at the scene of the crime. He had some sort of fit and.

to shake him out of hysteria, Kegan hit him just as his solicitor arrived at the police station. A further instance

of police brutality was concocted by George Biancardi with the help of a Mafiosa who had fled to England. Kegan was suspended from the Police Force. When the case came to trial it seemed that Kegan was the defendant rather than Biancardi. There is a firstclass trial scene in which the con-

founding of the ungodly was extremely difficult John Rossiter was, no doubt a policeman feared by criminals. His work would have left but little time for writing. It is to be hoped that retirement will allow him to give us many more novels of the high-standard of this one.