STRAIGHT AND CROOKED

New Zealand Listener, Volume 41, Issue 1049, 2 October 1959, Page 14

STRAIGHT AND CROOKED

SHADOW OF GUILT, by Patrick Quentins Victor Gollancz, price 12/6 TOUR THROUGH DEVON, by Guy En dore; Victor Gollancz, English price 12/6, A LITTLE SIN, by William M. Hardy; Hamish Hamilton, English price 12/6. SWING AWAY, CLIMBER, by Glyn Carr; Geoffrey Bles, English price 12/6. LL "detectives" and thrillers are complicated, but there are degrees of complication. The reader may find himself halted, perhaps with irritation, by flashbacks or psychological dissertations. Shadow of Guilt, by the trustworthy Patrick Quentin, illustrates well the type of story that moves rapidly from crisis to crisis and bristles with surprises, yet never impedes the reader’s progress. It is a walk’ and not an obstacle race. An American business man, married to a wealthy woman who tries to manage everything in sight at home and abroad, falls in love with his (apparently) more homely secretary. A young art protégée of his wife’s, who turns out to be a professional blackmailer, is murdered, and suspicion falls on a string of characters. The action is swift ahd exciting, the writing crystal clear, and the dénouement, shattering in its surprise. One believes it all might have happened in a credible society. This is a really good story ‘of its kind. By contrast, Guy Endore’s Detour Through Devon is like a tangled rope. It is one of the maddest thrillers I have read, but original in concept and treatment. An American truck driver stops by night for a break in a town, and the hitch-hiking hobo with him is staggered to find that this town is Devon, Indiana, where he was brought up in an orphanage, rose to be a professor of philology, was acquitted on a murder charge, and walked out on his wife to become a wanderer. As he walks about the town he tells his story The ruling passion of his life from childhood has been the study of words, words of every kind and in many languages, their meaning, origin and association. In his loneliness he savours words as some men savour poetry, or drink or tabacco. As he says, he would think of them in a ditch. For example, "blimp," "bloomers" and "balcony." Why, he asks, do almost all words beginning with "wr’ involve some kind of ,twisting: "wriggle," "wrestle," "writhe," "wrench," "wreathe" and so on. This is instructive and fascinating, and often amusing, but at times somewhat hampering. It is as if a thriller were annotated by our old friend Professor Arnold Wall. The last words of the book are "to mate is more than to meet, and to love is more than live," so you may guess what he found. This is the only thriller I have read that could be a text-book in a university library. A Little Sin, by William M. Hardy, takes us back to the more conventional type. This well-written story is based on university life in an American town with a flavour of politics. A married professor, well aware that it is an indiscretion, accepts an invitation from an attractive student-assistant to go bathing with her alone. He finds her murdered at the lakeside house, and thinks he catches a glimpse of the murderer, The wise course would be to go to the police with the whole story, but he lies and lies and lies, and naturally

gets himself more and more entangled, for clues pointing to him abound. He is convicted of murder but at the very last minute is saved from the "chair" by a series of thrilling developments. Swing Away Climber, is the second of Glyn Carr’s mountaineering mysteries to be noticed here. The Ice-Axe Murders was about a party in the Alps. Swing Away, Climber, tells us of rock-climbing in the Snowdon region. A most loathsome young pervert, expelled from the party in the hut, is found hanging by a climber’s rope against a rock wall. Everybody hopes it is suicide, as is at first believed, but truth and justice must be served. It is an agonising process by which Sir Abercrombie Lewker, the author’s Shakespearian actor plus detective, does, this, partly through his knowledge of climbing craft. There is a lot of technical stuff in the tale but plenty of human interest to keep it company, and the pen pictures of Welsh

landscape are fine.

A.

M.