THREE THRILLERS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 631, 3 August 1951, Page 13

THREE THRILLERS

| A BRUSH WITH DEATH, by Sheila Pim; | DR. MORELLE sAND THE DRUMMER | GIRL, by Ernest Dudley; DANGEROUS BY NATURE, by Manning Coles; Hodder and Stoughton. English price, 9/6 each. T is clearly my loss that Miss Pim’s fourth story is the first I have read. Here is a writer whose freshness of construction and style and. urbane outlook are welcome in the overcrowded field of fictional crime. The scene is the art world of Dublin; and the technicalities of painting, with which the attempted murder is linked, are described skilfully and amusingly. The difference between English and Irish life, as seen, for ex-

ample, in the mental processes of the Eireann police, is conveyed as if it were the judicious flavouring of a dish. This is an exceptionally agreeable book. On the other hand, Dr. Morelle reminds me of what an American critic wrote of: another non-professional detective: "Philo Vance needs a kick in the pants." I find this doctor-psychiat-rist-investigator, with his supercilious smile, his twitching nostrils, his special cigarettes and his rudeness, insufferable. The story is studded with clichés of situation and expression. That Manning Coles’s twelfth adventure of the English secret service agent (continued on page 15)

BOOK S

(Continued {tom page 13) Tommy Hambledon is the most amusing, may be due to the choice of scene, the exotic Central American republic of Esmeralda. We know what O. Henry did with such material, and in this tale I am at times delightfully reminded of Cabbages and Kings. There is enough action to satisfy the most avid. But wasn’t it inexcusably rash of Hambledon, now so well known in his profession, to pose as a professor in an English university? Even so backward a State as Esmeralda might possess an English book of refer-

ence:

A.

M.