John Gardner's Boysie Oakes, the lily-livered government liquidator, used always to provide some mildly enjoyable fun, but Gardner, too, has also been drawn into Holmes-mania, and will be, his blurb indicates, for two more books after last year's Return of Moriarty. Of Boysie he now seems weary, opening his tale of assassins' revenge in an atmosphere of seedy incapacity and ending with more or less the old set-up renewed, though Mostyn, Boysie's horrid master, has bought it. Boysie's inconsistency was always tricky—now a lily-liver, now a male Touchfeather—but it used to come off. In A Killer for a Song, it does not.

Marghanita Laski, "Deaths for the Idle," in The Listener, Vol. 93, No. 2398, March 20, 1975, p. 380.∗