CLIMAX AND ANTI-CLIMAX

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 762, 26 February 1954, Page 13

CLIMAX AND ANTI-CLIMAX

THE DEVIL THAT FAILED, by Maurice Samuel; Victor Gollancz, English price 12/6. THIRD PARTY RISK, by Nicolas Bentley; Michael Joseph, English price 10/6. A KNIFE FOR THE JUGGLER, by Manning Coles; Hodder and Stoughton, English price 10/6. CHRISTMAS AT CANDLESHOE, by Michael Innes; Victor Gollancz, English price 10/6. THE BARON IN FRANCE, by Anthony Morton; Hodder and English price 7/3 ASILY first in this list, and of high rank in any company, is Maurice Samuel’s story of a. happily circumstanced American who wakes up in a mysterious sanatorium to find himself a physical giant, as if from Gulliver’s Travels, in relation to, his human and inanimate surroundings. Kept a close prisoner, allowed no contact with the outside world, and treated in all respects as a giant patient by doctor and nurses, -he suffers agonies of mind in submitting to the regime, and trying to solve the mystery of his metamorphosis. Scientific imagination and detection are mingled with great skill. The patient has to do the detection single-handed, and his struggles and ultimate success wil] keep the reader in a state of taut suspense. A most ingenious idea, very well worked out. I have met many an innocent charac- ter in thrillers and "detectives" who, behaved most foolishly in holding back information from the police, but I doubt if among them there was such an ass as the hero of Nicolas Bentley’s Third Party Risk. By not going to the police when he found the corpse, he involved himself in a horrid chain of dangerous sleuthing. It is certainly an exciting story, laid in England and France, but the revelation of what all the plotting and killing has been about is an anticlimax so disturbing as to shake the

whole edifice of the book. The plot does not do justice to Nicolas Bentley’s talents. I might say the same of A Knife for the Juggler, the 16th adventure of the secret service agent Tommy Hambledon. Manning Coles, I feel, is rather tired. I cannot swallow the idea of an_ elaborate organisation to kidnap Communists, but there is the usual rush of adventure, and Tommy’s assistants, Campbell ‘and Foragn, are always worth meeting. To adapt an American crack, the latest story by that accomplished artist in intellectual sleuthing, Michael Innes, Christmas at Candleshoe, suffers from fallen archness. The tale is laid in two neighbouring English country homes, one | a show place whose noble owner is glad of the half-crowns, and the other a decaying relic inhabited by two eccentrics who live in the past attended by a troop of impossible children, ready to repel strangers with arrows. Into this madhouse are projected an American student and his mother. The crime consists of the faking and theft of two Old Masters. The oddest things happen, but the trouble is they are oddly dull. Michael Innes has pulled out every stop in the organ of his exceptional erudition, and at the same time has been determined to make every line bright. The effect is rather suffocating. The ignorance of critics! Anthony Morton has written 29 books about "The Baron," and they have been translated into several languages and broadcast; yet I never heard of either until I handled the latest, The Baron in France. This Raffles-Robin Hood turned art dealer, with detection as a side-line, has the conventional dash, charm, courage and resource, and his rescue of a friend condemned to death for murder is fast and varied. I should place him a little higher than that other new acquaintance "The Toff," but that may be because he has a beautiful wife. I am eettine rather tired of bachelor detec-

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