... . By John and Emery Bonnett. Michael Joseph ;8s. 6 d.) This is a reviewer's paradise-- a convincing novel about a murdered writer. ...

... by Ray Allister (Deputising for Robert Done, on holiday.) OF two October plays, one was right for television; the other was just right. I want to demonstrate the world of difference between their qualifications. It 's a honey of a play. We were talking three weeks before the play was produced. The speaker was Royston Morley, senior television drama producer, and the honey was Frank Tilsley's ...

... WE 'LL HEAR. -A PLAY. By J. C. Trewin. (Carroll and Nicholson 12s. 6 d.) MY colleague, Mr. J. C. Trewin, has an inveterate love of apt quotation-- no the thumbed phrases that are pulled by the hair out of dictionaries of Quotations and dumped down in the text, but those supremely right yet somehow unanticipated sentence which fit his text without strain. I find this gift for quotation an ...

... . by Rupert Croft-Cooke By Marguerite Steen. (Collins 12s. 6 d.) THIS novel is planned and executed in the heroic tradition. Like Miss Steen's earlier book, The Sun is My Undoing, it has a central character who sees and does, knows, feels and dares, while around him is an ever-changing panorama of scene and character. It is thus in the main stream of English fiction, in direct descent from the ...

... . By Marghanita L'aski. Cresset Press 9s. 6d.) THIS is the straightforward stor of Hilary Wainwright's journe to France in 1945 to find his sma son, who had been lost during th Occupation. It is a good idea, and Miss Las! has handled it with some skill, but it lel me thinking, not without exasperation, ho\ much better it could have been. Wainwrigh himself is stuffy and starched and only reall ...

... WAGHORN'S WAY The Pioneer of the Overland Mail As late as the third decade of the nineteenth century the conveyance of mail between London and Bombay was a business of fantastic difficulty. Between Bombay and Suez the steamers were hopelessly inadequate, and had to be crammed even to the Saloon with coal to ensure that they would get the 1,710 miles into Aden, the longest leg of the journey. ...

... THE fourth volume of Mr. Sean O'Casey's memoirs is as rich and tempestuous read ing as its predecessors; reward ing, but a little headachey in the long run. INISHFALLEN FARE THEE WELL (Macmillan. 16s.) opens in Dublin in the days of the throubles and the Black and Tans, and ends with the author's leaving Ireland for England, where he has now lived for many years. It is a book whose quality ...

... THE romantic approach is used in fiction perhaps more often than strictly neces sary, and certainly this is true of that form of fiction, the historical novel, a dangerously vague term in itself. There seems to be something particu larly tempting in trying this kind of approach in writing of the late eighteenth century, and the very early nineteenth century. vvnetner it is tne iteign 01 terror ...

... THE POE CENTENARY The Anthology of a Tragic Genius A writer whose successors include Dorothy Sayers (creator of Lord Peter Wimsey), Jules Verne (exponent of the scientific romance) and Stephane Mallarmé (the French poet and leader of the Symbolists), was nothing if not versatile. Edgar Allan Poe, the centenary of whose death is recalled this month, was in his own day supreme as an inventor of ...

... THE divine Sarah is an excellent subject for a biography; volatile, uncon ventional, world-famous to this day and spectacular in her own. Sarah Bernhardt (Hurst and Blackett. 21s.) is her story as told by her granddaughter, and it is not only a record of her stage triumphs, but a fairly intimate account of her not very private life. Even as a child Bernhardt was tempestuous and was already ...

... THIS has been a rich week for novels and a busy one for women writers, who are respon sible for nine of the books under review. In the historical field, the stories range from a frontier town in the 90's to Israel in the ninth century B.C., and in the modern field they cover Italy, Africa, Assam and the west coast of Ireland, as well as the English countryside and our familiar London. To begin ...

... Cbt tfc- Tlik Philadelphia Story (l>ii-lievs) Aiithony (ookniiiii THE late Philip Barry was the American playwright who worked sometimes with a soulful left hand and sometimes with a cynical right. It depended on whether the Maeterlinck-Pirandello or the Somerset Maugham mood was uppermost. What crept down the left-hand sleeve was drama like The Hotel Universe and Here Come The Clowns. It ...