IN A DARK GONDOLA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 809, 28 January 1955, Page 10

IN A DARK GONDOLA

MISSION TO VENICE, by Raymond Marshall; Robert Hale, English price 9/6. VENICE, PRESERVE ME, by _ John Appleby; Hodder and Stoughton, English price 9/6. ADDERS ABOUNDING, by John Lukens; Hodder and Stoughton, English price 10/6. NO THOROUGHFARE, by Denise Egerton; Hodder and English price 10/6. THE RETURN OF THE BLACK GANG, by Gerard Fairlie, following "Sapper"; Hodder and Stoughton, English price 10/6. THE TOFF AT THE FAIR, by John Creasey; Hodder and Stoughton, English price 7/3. AST we glide, and, past, and past!" Since I fell in love with Browning’s "In a Gondola" many years ago, I have never met a gondola in a crime story, and now before me are two thrillers jacketed with the craft. And why not? The gondola is an integral part of Venice’s romance and mystery. It is silent, and if you have a scrap with someone you can toss him overboard. Don Micklem, the American millionaireadventurer in Mission to Venice, keeps his own gondola and gondolier there, and they come in handy in a series of roughhouses when Don goes to solve the mystery of a British secret service agent who is supposed to have gone over to the Communists. (Of course, he hasn't.)

This is super-Buchan stuff in the crazy speed and variety of its thrills. It lacks the master’s touch, but there is plenty of excitement, and Venice's part in the tale gives it a few extra marks. In Venice, Preserve Me, by John Appleby, of the BBC, we are on a much higher level-« well-written book, with judicious thrills balanced by an original presentation of a man driven to murder through wounds to his selfesteem. Someone murdered a woman in a hotel room now occupied by an English girl on holiday, and left a vital clue behind. The battle is fought between. the murderer, and the girl and her former fiancée, an unconventional rolling stone who has become a tourist guide. The action takes place against a skilfully painted background of history and art. Murder is murder everywhere, but after so much communing with it in hotel lounges and night-clubs, I find it a pleasant change to study it in a rural scene like the New Forest. Something of the good earth of ancient England comes in to John Lukens’s Adders Abounding The hero, toughened by war, joins a community of forestry workers to find out what happened to his brother, and uncovers something. very sinister. The industry and its setting are well described, and there is a convincing love romance. How would you feel if you were a penniless artist going blind? The narrator of Denise Egerton’s No Thoroughfare is in this plight in London, when a proposition of impersonation in Cornwall is put to him. The skulduggery in Cornwall seems to me pretty ordinary, but the reactions of the narrator to his blindness in all kinds of situations give the book some impressiveness. After "following" "Sapper" in several books, Gerard Fairlie. in The Return of the Black Gang, resurrects Carl Peterson to confront Bulldoo> Drummond again. Carl didn’t die in that air-crash after all. And Irma reappears, too. No more need be said. . At the end of the procession I give a curt nod to "The Toff," off on his ninth

adventure.

A.

M.