Death and the Visiting Fireman

Action, dialogue, and the author's 'stage directions' combine to give a filmic quality to this firstnovel. And not often before has a murder puzzle been solved by a committee of suspects. Any man or woman travelling on the stagecoach High Flier that morning could have killed the insupportable 'highwayman', George Hamyadis, and had reasons to do so. And that included Foster P. Schlemberger, president of the American Institution for the Investigation of Incendiarism Inc., whose delegates had been greeted at Southampton by this latter-day coaching party in period costume. He may have protested that it was a European crime and no concern of his, but none the less origins lay quite a long way back in another continent. A scintillating debut