[If "Tiger in the Smoke"] is not perhaps the finest flower of all the year's garden, it is definitely a flower and not a weed. Indeed, it is a splendid, gaudy, extravagant bloom, guaranteed to please. For it is the product of a real practitioner, of a writer (if I may drop my horticultural figure), willing to take pains with plot, sufficiently talented to write graceful and perceptive prose, sensitive enough to character to make human beings out of victim, criminal and detective alike.

True, "Tiger in the Smoke" might seem to the purist to own a flaw or two. Although Miss Allingham has invented a new detective, an admirable and fascinating man named Charles Luke—although even Albert Campion figures briefly here as a sop, no doubt, to Allingham readers who expect him—this is not really a detective story at all. Clues do not solve the...