CLASSIC CRIME

UNDER A DARK ANGEL’S EYE by Patricia Highsmith (Virago £20, 640 pp)

It Is a good rule never to judge a work of art by the character of the artist. Patricia Highsmith is a case in point. With the morals of an alley cat and cruel by nature, she was, nonetheless, one of the greatest crime writers of the last century.

Nobody in a Highsmith story can be taken for granted. Common decency is a thin veneer easily cracked to release an undercurrent of depravity.

While this collection of her short pieces, published to mark her centenary, starts gently with a marital dispute, we are soon on a voyage into the darker recesses of the imagination.

If one is looking for a recurring theme, it is that evil intent can be made to seem simple, even logical. Given the right circumstances, Highsmith tells us, the most reasonable person can turn nasty. Graham Greene called Highsmith ‘the poet of apprehension’. How right he was.

DANCE OF DEATH by Helen McCloy (Agora £8.99, 278 pp)

The coming-out party of a New York socialite ends tragically when her body is found in a snowdrift. How she came to be there is puzzling enough, but more baffling is that, in freezing conditions, her death was caused by heatstroke.

With the police struggling, it falls to Dr Basil Willing, a psychologist on the staff of the district attorney, to apply his knowledge of the byways of human behaviour.

Unravelling the plot takes in mistaken identity, financial chicanery and deadly poison.

Making her name in the interwar years, McCloy’s talent transcends the generations. Dance Of Death is as fresh and exciting as a newly minted novel, while Basil Willing, with his Holmes-like insights, is a character to cherish.

THE PRIME MINISTER’S PENCIL by Cecil Waye (Dean Street Press £10.99, 238 pp)

It’s bad enough that the Prime Minister is assassinated. But when there’s no way of telling how he met his end, it gets a lot worse. the post mortem shows the victim died from an explosive force, yet the room in which he was sitting is undamaged.

With links to those closest to the late premier, private investigator Christopher Perrin joins forces with scotland Yard to explain the inexplicable.

At the heart of the story is the corruption that thrives on the interlock between politics and high finance.

It’s not giving too much away to reveal that atomic energy, a science still in its infancy when this was first published, has a lot to answer for. tight plotting makes for a brain-teaser that has lost none of its appeal in the intervening years.