Miss Allingham has turned from detective fiction to a rather solemn and inconsequent variety of romantic psychology [with Dance of the Years, published in the United States as The Galantrys]….

There is no hesitation in [the] recital of events, but the events themselves, it must be confessed, too often seem entirely arbitrary. Again and again there seems no particular reason, in fact, in spite of James's touchy and brooding preoccupation with his heredity, why he should have behaved as Miss Allingham says he did. Towards the end she permits him, by an unaccountable effort of prescience or prophecy, to leap ahead a couple of generations and to listen to the rumble of tanks in 1941, and the apparent determination not to stop short before our own day is reached gives the measure of Miss Allingham's artifice in this serious, sometimes engagingly level-headed but altogether too stiffly contrived piece of...