Some criminal intelligence

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33804, 29 March 1975, Page 10

Some criminal intelligence

You Can Help Me. By Maisie Birmingham. Collins. 189 pp. N.Z. price: $4.85. It is a tried and trusted formula among crime writers to place a group of disparate characters in an unusual setting and observe their clashes and confrontations within an isolated microcosm. In this very readable first novel the microcosm is a London Citizens’ Advice Bureau just off Petticoat Lane, where amid the vomit of repentant drunkards and the

residual coke bottles of teenage meetings, eight variously-motivated social workers live, work — and sometimes kill. The head of the bureau is Agnes Campbell, gracious and unflappable; it is her attractive deputy, Kate Weatherley, who tells the story and gets the knocks. A very battered body is found in a bed — always a reliable spine-chiller — and the murderer gets up to some hanky-panky with the bedroom gas-fires. Unfair Exchange. By Marian Babson. Collins. 190 pp. N.Z. price: $4.85. Catty ex-wives and sweet put-upon second wives — where would writers be without them? Set in cottages and canals around London, this lightweight piece of crime detection concerns newly-married Zita Fallbridge, who with, her husband absent on a trip to America, is fair game for her husband’s unscrupulous ex-wife Caroline, her wilful daughter Fanny and several menacing menfriends with names like Xavier and Melancholy. There is a corpse that is shifted

from one dwelling to another by persons unknown, rain-coated men watching the house, a stuffed giraffe called Romeo (the precocious Fanny hopes to buy him a mate which she will call Alpha), a suspicious windowcleaner, and the kidnapping and drugging of Fanny. All promising ingredients, but the Enid Blyton prose keeps it on the dullest of levels. The Hound and the Fox and the Harper. By Shaun Herron. Coronet Books. 234 pp. N.Z. price: >l.lO.

The book’s title is taken from an old Gaelic folk tale which is printed on the first page. It involves a hound that always catches its quarry, a fox that is never run down, and a harper or minstrel who tells the tale. The hound in Shaun Herron’s grim paperback thriller is The Firm, an American Government-backed intelligence agency, (sounding suspiciously like the C.1.A.), whose operatives are out to kill a sometime employee who is writing a book detailing some of their more questionable practices. The wily fox of the piece is redheaded Miro, a tough fiftyish IrishAmerican with more ways of evading his pursuers than there are bristles on a pig. Miro’s young pregnant wife Eva is his one vulnerable spot, and when Communist spies move in and kidnap her, he calls on his Irish friends — the doctor, publican and schoolteacher from the rumbustious village of Killyroe, plus a gypsy harper and his cohorts. The final debacle in the O’Brien mansion when the trio of spies go down under a melange of gypsies, firemen and beer bottles is superbly done.