HOMICIDE SQUAD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 914, 15 February 1957, Page 14

HOMICIDE SQUAD

THE STRONG BOX, by Howard Swiggett; Hodder and Stoughton, English price 13/6. THE SLEEPING PARTNER, by Winston Graham; Hodder and Stoughton, English price 12/6. SHE DIED WITHOUT LIGHT, by Nieves Mathews; Hodder and Stoughton, English price 11/6. STRANGER IN THE DARK, by Helen Nielsen; Victor Gollancz, Enflish price 11/6. CRIME OUT OF MIND, by Delano Ames; Hodder and Stoughton, English price 10/6. THE TOFF IN NEW © YORK, by John. Say ard Hodder and Stoughton, price APPLEBY TALKS ' AGAIN, Eighteen Stories, by Michael Innes; Victor English price 10/6. THE _

MYSTERY OF THE SLEEPING CAR EXPRESS, and Other Stories, by Freeman Wills Crofts; Hodder and Stoughton, English price 11/6. OWARD SWIGGETT’S The Strong Box is so much a thriller with a difference that it might escape classification. The middle-aged head of an American mission, rich, cultivated, and much loved, dies in London, and the smoke of mystery immediately rises from his private-papers. For his reputation’s sake (a hint of scandal would be jam to the witch-hunters in America) a younger man next in succession resolves to explore and bury the mystery, knowing that in so acting he himself may crash. This he does with the help of two'women who were close to the dead man. As one reviewer says, there is not a gun or a chase in it; the

well-maintained tension is one of wits, emotions, and conflicting loyalties. This is a well-written political and social novel, ranging between London, America, Sweden and Paris, of exceptional power and interest. The corpse in The Sleeping Partner, by Winston Graham, does not arrive till half way, and the husband’s hunt for his wife’s murderer is less interesting than the play of characters. The best of these in a tale above the average is a scientist dying of a disease contracted in research. A philosophical humanist, he shows courage and understanding when he finds that his wife and the husband are in love, and helps to solve the crime. With verve, pace and sparkle, Nieves. Mathews (daughter of Salvador de Madariaga, historian and ene-time

Spanish Minister) presents an original version of the ruthless-household-tyrant theme. At a Swiss pension an English doctor is astonished to find that the assorted guests put. up with scandalous inefficiency. Bit by bit he discovers that the proprietress has a hold over everyone, and he himself is drawn into the blackmailer’s toils. She repels attack and taunts them openly and triumphantly, but in the end they escape, by what means I don’t propose to say. It is an exciting and fantastic tale. I doubt if Helen Nielsen is quite so good in Stranger in the Dark, where an innocent young American meets skullduggery in Copenhagen, as she is on her own American sidewalks, but Denmark’s capital may be new to you as a setting, as it is to me. In Crime Out of Mind, Delano Ames takes Dagobert and Jane to the Austrian Tyrol, where murder goes back to a Nazi prison camp. Not one of the best about this likeable pair. The physical peak in John Creasey’s The Toff in New York comes when the English sleuth grapples with a gangster on a parapet at the top of a hundred-storey building. It isn’t "The Toff" who falls the thousand feet. The volumes of short stories by two leading practitioners make agreeable dipping in bed. Some of the adventures of Michael Innes’s Appleby are only four or five pages long. He is suave and erudite; Freeman Wills Crofts the policeman on the beat. There are two Crofts curiosities for collectors: his first story, and one commissioned to describe a "perfect" murder. A real-life ex-C.I.D, man shot the construction full of holes, and his marksmanship is reproduced here an instructive exposition of police

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