Milk of Human Kindness

Rating:
Summary: Feminine Tripe
Review: For all the praise which some critics heap on Miss Ferrars, this is a deplorable book. It is more suspense than detection, and feminine at that: amidst a welter of domestic detail, the narrator and other characters keep discussing their feelings, rather than bothering to detect; hence, speculation takes the place of ratiocination. The reader spends the first half of the story impatiently waiting for the murder to occur, and wondering why the author views her characters in terms of materials, rather than being interested in the feeble complications caused by a Roger Clegg picture and by a housekeeper whose employers have the habit of dying on her. When murder does take place, the victim is repellent, but arbitrary, and it is hard to take much interest in the unravelment of what passes for the problem. The solution is notably unconvincing: if the murderer is planning to take his own life, why take another's to cover the traces? Even the poorly conceived multiple solutions, which it would be an insult to Mr. Berkeley to compare to The Poisoned Chocolates Case, hold more water than this. In short: to be avoided by all readers of detective stories.

Rating:
Summary: Feminine Tripe
Review: For all the praise which some critics heap on Miss Ferrars, this is a deplorable book. It is more suspense than detection, and feminine at that: amidst a welter of domestic detail, the narrator and other characters keep discussing their feelings, rather than bothering to detect; hence, speculation takes the place of ratiocination. The reader spends the first half of the story impatiently waiting for the murder to occur, and wondering why the author views her characters in terms of materials, rather than being interested in the feeble complications caused by a Roger Clegg picture and by a housekeeper whose employers have the habit of dying on her. When murder does take place, the victim is repellent, but arbitrary, and it is hard to take much interest in the unravelment of what passes for the problem. The solution is notably unconvincing: if the murderer is planning to take his own life, why take another's to cover the traces? Even the poorly conceived multiple solutions, which it would be an insult to Mr. Berkeley to compare to The Poisoned Chocolates Case, hold more water than this. In short: to be avoided by all readers of DETECTIVE stories.