MAKING CRIME PAY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 657, 8 February 1952, Page 17

MAKING CRIME PAY

ag T is possible to turn crime into quite a profitable business, provided, of course, that it has been committed by somebody else, and that one comes no nearer to it than writing about it. Gordon Ashe discovered this when he began to put his Fleet Street experience into writing his series of "Patrick Dawlish" stories. Most of his early career was spent in reporting trials in the Old Bailey, where he was able to observe various criminal types, from the common thieves to the gang "bosses." What he saw there, when it was combined with his powerful imagination and his ability to tell a story, became invaluable material for his thrillers. Four books of Ashe’s "Patrick Dawlish" adventures have been broadcast from the ZB stations, and there are four more to come. The first of these will be "Misleading Lady," the story of one person’s determination to revenge himself upon a hated relative. Gangsters, an

actress, a seventy-year-old millionaire, and the inevitable detective ‘spend a good deal of their (and the listeners’) time running around in criminal circles. The second story is "Dark Mystery," which begins in a fashionable tennis club with-appropriately enough-a girl _being found gagged and bound in a closed locker. The darkness becomes more intense in the cawes of .Cornwall where Dawlish discovers a gang of smugglers doing a roaring trade converting MittelEuropeans into Respectable British Citizens. There follows, in quick succession, a series of threats, abductions, and potential blowings-up, but fortunately all comes right in the end, After that "A Puzzle in Pearls" could be termed something of an anticlimax, as it deals merely with the disappearance of a string of pearls, with only an odd murder and abduction thrown in. However, the fourth story, "Three of a Kind," gets back into the groove. Here Dawlish becomes entangled in a conglomeration of murder, cattle and crop diseases, fires and espionage. His disentanglement of the problem makes a brisk conclusion to the series.