ASSORTED MURDERS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 789, 3 September 1954, Page 13

ASSORTED MURDERS

THE GREAT MAIL ROBBERY, by Clarence Budington Kelland; Museum Press, English price 9/6. WELCOME DEATH, by Glyn Daniel; Victor Gollancz, English price 10/6. REHEARSAL FOR DEATH, by Theodora Benson; Victor Gollancz, English price 10/6. THE NARROWING CIRCLE, by Julian Symons; Victor Gollancz, English price 10/6. "yON’T be put off by the garish jacket on The Great Mail Robbery, for it is one of the most original and best written of recent "detectives." The hero is a Post Office detective in New York, and his investigation into a most ingenious and ruthless system of parcel robbery takes the reader to the centre of a vast national utility. As one would expect from the author of Mr. Deeds Comes to Town, Kelland has an eye for odd characters. I have come across nothing more diverting of the kind than his two women in the dress-shop from which the hunt starts--one a "Brahmin" from Boston who dresses like a guy and talks in a. vernacular that would shock the Cabot-Lodges; and her young assistant who combines extreme. shyness and awkwardness with an entrancing gift for taking in a person at a glance and describing him or her in complete detail, to the great advantage of the chase. Arising out of these two, and Kelland’s general use of the tingling American idiom, there is. a good deal of fun in this story. Discarding the pseudonym he _ used in his first crime novel, Glyn Daniel is revealed on the jacket of his second, Welcome Death, as a Cambridge lecturer. He should find enough fellow practitioners there-as in Oxford-to form a branch of the Detection Club. In this book he moves from the University, as the scene, to a village in South Wales, where two comrades in the last war return to face tragedy and frustration in their personal affairs. The murder is one of these time-table affairs I find so unsatisfactory, but the interplay of village life is well described. Glyn Daniel looks like a promising recruit. Theodora Benson’s first "detective," following stories acclaimed by critics, shows what a handicap cleverness may be.. Rehearsal for Death, a tale of a company that goes down from London (continued on next page)

BOOKS

(continued trom previous page) to produce two plays under the auspices of a wealthy old harridan, moves in a fog of impossible characters, fantastic dialogue, and erudite and elusive ’commentary. I could not be sure who (if any) was married to whom, who was in love with whom, or just where the ghost ship was drifting, and I didn’t care. Whereas Theodora Benson’s sophistication is intellectual and somewhat dithering, Julian Symons’s is direct, clear, hard-boiled and sometimes brutal. The Narrowing Circle is set in irony, for the narrator is an employee of a London enterprise that mass produces (writing as well as publishing) crime and other fiction, and finds himself "framed" for the murder of a colleague and first suspect of Scotland Yard. How should a producer of fictional crime proceed to clear himself? The circle of inquiry widens to South Africa and narrows back to the office. This is a fastmoving, tense, well-written book about buccaneering business circles; and if you don’t mind the proportion of likeable characters being distressingly low,

you should enjoy it.

A.

M.