Evening star., 1951-12-09
By Mirium Gutenberg


into exploring big city corruption
and the sins of the Silk-gloved
racketeerS.
With few exceptions, they were
more successful with international
crime than local corruption
which might be explained by the
fact that the more astute authors
chose the spy-type yarns. Out
standing among them were Miss
Christie's They Came to Bagh-
dad" Coles Now or Never"
Eric Ambler's Judgment on Delt-
chew Sterling Noel's II Killed
Stalin.' John Sherwood's Mr.
Blessington's Imperialist Plot"
and Geoffrey Household S "A Time
to Kill" Ambler's painstaking
study of the phony pageantry of
a Communist trial is not up to the
standard of his prewar thrillers
but it's still above the average of
his imitators. OF II Killed Stalin,"
the book sellers here report brisk
business in Government and en-
bassy circles. Mr.. Blessingtons
Curtain. however. is more likely to
annoy the Communists because of
its broad satire on the party line
as it operates in satellite states.
The Kefauver Committee
Was Better on Television
Many tried but few succeeded
at fictionalizing the kind of reve-
lationS that made the Kefauver
committees televised hearings SO
absorbing to SO many people. It
was as if the presence of the real
thing dimmed the shock value OF
the fiction version. Charles
Francis Coe attempted to picture
an international crime syndicate
in action but produced nothing
more than purple melodrama
Much more succesSful-possibly
because of the attractiveness OF
the amateur sleuths-was Muir
der for the Holidays" by Howard
Rigsby. Here, the calculated
trend toward the respectable front
for the racket boys of rum-run-
ming days is analyzed as an in
tegral part of a brisk kill-or-be-
killed plot. Incidentally. Rigsby
forSook his Sleuthing Mr.. and Mrs
Holiday, for his second novel of the
year, Kill and Tell" but still
managed to turn out an effective
Shocker. Several authors attempt
ed to make villains of the cops
but a rule of the trade that rates
it something less than cricket to
combine the detective and the
killer in one role discouraged that
trend.
Crime and Mystery
In Historic Setting
Some of the years most read
able 1ction came out of the au-
thorS' laudable intent to produce
something gripping or funny or
unusual or thrilling without pay
ing a moments heed to the trou-
blous times. In these puzzlers,
1851 got into the act only for
background or satire.
John Dickson Carr. for one. for
SOCK the modern day entirely.
Combining his nostalgia for the
past with his command of water
tight plotting, Carr created a $50
year-old murder and sent his hero
back in time to solve it.. II all
happens in the roaring days of
King Charles II and is filled with
a wealth of period detail that
sometimes slows but never stops
the plot.
Another tour de force-amazing
principally because IL writer's
combined to produce twas THE
Marble Forest" under the pseu-
donym of Theo Durrant. Laid
principally in cemetery. this
eerie tale involves the efforts of
an anguished father to locate the
grave" of his living child before
she suffocates.
Picking the Top Ten
At Christmastime
Two authors took on advertising
agencies for their settings and
both did so well with the idea
that others can be expected to
produce spate of ad writer mur-
ders. Mary McMullen combined
her obviously intimate knowledge
of an advertising agency with q