Books in Brief: Death under Sail

Death under Sail, by C. P. Snow (Scribner’s, 255 pp., $10.95). The Scribner’s business department apparently wanted a memento for Lord Snow’s fans while his obituary was still fresh in their minds, so it chose his first book, a murder mystery published in 1932. It is doubtful the editorial department had a hand in the reissue. The book is in many ways better than his last novel, A Coat of Varnish, also a mystery story; it certainly is more successful at what mysteries are supposed to do —entertain. But beginner’s flaws mar it, and the passage of fifty years shows in its prose. Seven friends go for a holiday on the yacht of one of them, a jolly but inept physician. As the boat drifts around a bend on the English Broads they find the doctor dead at the rudder, a bullet through his heart. It is a locked-room problem afloat. As a scene for solving the riddle, Snow provides a manse on the riverbank, and for a diversion a cranky housekeeper to oversee the proceedings. As none of the vacationers can be trusted to solve the crime dispassionately, each being a suspect, Snow introduces a silver-tongued stranger named Finbow. Subtle interrogations by candlelight. Midnight skull sessions in a rowboat. Finbow’s sense of the theatrical is as fine as his rhetoric. Bit by bit, motives for murder emerge. But, like most mysteries, it grows tiresome three-fourths of the way through. Finbow’s charm accomplishes too much too neatly. His carefully stage-managed probings take place, after a while, at Snow’s convenience. They move the plot, but they don’t ring true. So much for problems common to the genre. The book also suffers from an annoying syntactical fault— the ambiguous adjective. “She writhed a long thin arm round his neck” as opposed, no doubt, to her short fat arm. Each chapter has half a dozen of these. They break the mood of mystery, a mortal sin that modern readers, jaded as they are, won’t forgive a writer living or dead.