DEATHS AND DECEPTIONS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 927, 17 May 1957, Page 13

DEATHS AND DECEPTIONS

THE DIEHARD, by Jean Potts; Victor Gollancz, English price 12/6. INSPECTOR QUEEN’S OWN CASE, by Ellery Queen; Victor Gollancz, oS sige price 12/6. THE MAN IN THE NET, by Patrick Quentin; Victor Gollancz, English price 12/6. DEATH OF AN ADMIRAL, by Gilbert HackforthJones; Hodder and Stoughton, English price 12/6. THE STORY THAT COULD NOT BE TOLD, by Martha Albrand; Hodder and Stoughton, English price 12/6, PARELS FOR WEST, by John Creasey; Hodder and Stoughton, English ice 11/6. AGENT FROM THE WEST, y David Williams; Jonathan Cape, English price 13/6. md Al through his wife’s funeral Lew Morgan wrestled with a nervous, unseemly urge to yawn"-a promising first sentence. I thought Jean Potts’s second "detective" a falling away from the brilliance of Go, Lovely Rose. Her third book, The Diehard, is much less of a thriller, but perhaps a better novel. Lew Morgan is a successful American business man, family tyrant, cheerful vulgarian, completely selfish, and attractive to women. More than one person wishes him dead, and dead he becomes. The chief interest is the psychology of the family and of Morgan’s mistress. The two grown-up children behave before their father like rabbits before a stoat, which unfortunately is what sometimes happens in real life. Ellery Queen’s police-inspector father has hovered round Ellery in many a mystery. Now, in his retirement, he has a case of his own-multiple murder. The old man is as likeable as he is competent, and so is the nurse of fifty with whom he teams up and falls in love. Their romance is a pleasant foil to the evil world they explore; and helping them, are a policeman and his wife who could serve as mocels of American practical warmbheartedness. ate! does not appear and I didn’t miss im. Another well-known American practitioner, Patrick Quentin, makes The Man in the Net a very tense tale of an artist who is caught in the toils of an elaborate frame-up for the murder of his problem wife. The villagers’ lynching-party hunt for him will make you hold your breath. A tape recording reveals the truth in highly dramatic fashion, but the use of this God-from-the-machine threatens to become common. Gilbert Hackforth-Jones’s twelfth novel, Death of an Admiral, is based on another kind of frame-up. A British submarine commander inherits from an admiral a problem of vengeance on a German U-boat officer for having, as the admiral believed, killed his wife and

child wantonly after their ship had been sunk. The German comes to England, satisfies the Englishman of’ his innocence, and, as a man of honour, expounds the ethics of his profession. The solving of the mystery is accompanied by well-described routine submarine operations. This is a good amphibious

story written by a man who commanded submarines. I can follow my commendation of Martha Albrand’s The Masque of Alexander with one for The Story That _ Could Not Be Told. This more compact book tells of an extraordinary imperson(continued on next page)

BOOKS ation. A distinguished German returns to his family and a high security job after some years in a Russian prison. About to greet him on the frontier, his wife is killed by a lorry. The adult daughter has no suspicion that the death was planned murder, and as the reader soon learns, that her supposed father is a Russian who closely resembles him, and lived with him in Russia. However, a young American secret agent is handy, and you will not be surprised that the discovery of the deception is accomPanied by romance. This is an impressive study of the extreme in espionage, with accessories to. match, as they say on the Woman’s Page. I much prefer John Creasey’s Scotland Yard to his extravagances with "The

Toff." Parcel for Inspector West uncovers Post Office thefts in good style. A woman might say it is easier to cook a roast than to make a light souffle. I might say it is easier to write a "serious" thriller than a satirically funny one. In Agent from the West, an Englishman takes service as tutor to the son of a rebel in a Balkan State, and he and his friends are involved in a series of farcical manoeuvres. Alas. the

mixture does not rise.

A.

M.