Review by Nick Fuller
2/5
Dull and commonplace suburban setting with tennis court on which vicious Caligulan youth is strangled, without any footprints left in the mud. Over-written and under-plotted: thick neurotic atmosphere in which emotions are as much strained to breaking point as the reader's patience; while lacking in the crucial complexity of the author at his best, who admitted "that book should have been a novelette" (Greene). Owing to singular paucity of suspects, the reader should be able to guess the villain without difficulty, despite police suspicion of the thick-headed hero and his lover, who speaks nauseatingly of the victim's "poor old face." Solution is as impossible as the situation; not only difficult to visualise, but Frankly preposterous: would anyone be so stupid? Too many theatre people, who are as bad as anything in Clayton Rawson; and very little Dr. Fell, who acts badly out of character, gloating at the villain: "I now propose ... to give myself the extreme pleasure of telling you where you get off... The gallows. They are going to hang you." The last words suggest a plea on the author's part: "He may, perhaps,be excused for not being up to his usual form." He won't be.