["Fantasy and Fugue"] is at least as exciting and as disturbing as [Roy Fuller's first crime novel] "The Second Curtain" and by that token one of the more considerable mysteries in this or any other season. Like its predecessor it has the haunting quality of those entertainments with which Graham Greene expressed his alertness to the Thirties. But like its predecessor too Mr. Fuller's novel has its own integrity and its own expressiveness in explicating an unsettled state of mind.

Its principal is a younger brother through whose multiple awareness we recall a murder and its precedents while he goes through London carrying a great bundle of incertitude which may just possibly be a corpse. It is all a most uncommon evocation which, while never losing hold of its first objective, manages half a hundred deft, often sardonic, comments on contemporary tastes and failings. Curious, meticulous and memorable...