"Hither and Thither In Quick Shining Trickles"

Radio Record, Volume VII, Issue 52, 5 July 1935, Page 22

"Hither and Thither In Quick Shining Trickles"

London Critic on Louis Golding’s New Book

[z was at the tender age of six that Louis. Golding’s literary genius first showed {tself. He developed a passion for literature and made his own bow with an epigrammatic poem about a boy who ++ got a big smack, said he’d go back To school, The fool." From the time he was twelve till he left Oxford he supported himself by scholarships. He has travelled the face of the globe and he has the reputation.

of being the most widely travelled English author. In 1981 he wrote "Magnolia Street"-and by that work he added considerable lustre to an already well-known name. In 1985 he has written "The Camberwell Beauty," a book that a London critic has deseribed as "running hither and thither in quick.shining trickles," This new book starts with a bang and has the reager sitting bolt upright until the final breastige of the tape. In fact, it would be almost impossible to find a more perfect example of modern detective fiction. A mere couple of dozen pages leads the reader into the promise of exciting possibilities, A beautiful young shop-girl comes rushing back to London from Sicily with the announcement that her brand- . new undergraduate husband has been murdered by n man named Tomlinson, who is also a magician of no mean order, being -fully equipped with

demons, skulls, triangles, goats’ blood and what not, The shop-girl is so beautiful and her distress so genuine that another undergraduate and a veterinary surgeon’s kennelman named Alf volunteer to go back to Sicily to avenge the victim of black magic. The party is increased by the presence of old Mr. Peveril, a butterfiy-collector with a romantic soul and a sneaking interest in the occult sciences, And here, with his story working out in the pleasantest manner possible, Golding picks up a sledge hammer and smashes his shining little jewel to pieces. Mr, Peveril discovers that the Sicilian magician is a butterfly-collec-’ tor, too, and the two become as thick as thieves. Tomlinson explains that the young husband died of influenza ~-which is apparently the truth-and there the matter closes. In the meantime the two young men have been kidnapped by the Mafia. In the end they return to London to find that the beautiful shop-gir] has already forgotten about her husband and has gone off with a flashy gentleman in a motorcar. Alf, the kennelman, goes back to Sicily to marry the daughter of one of the Mafiosi, : ‘ "The Camberwell Beauty," Louis Golding (Gollancz). Our copy from the publishers,