The mystery novel has changed in many ways since 1900, and this Matthew Hope adventure [Jack and the Beanstalk] is a tour de force of the new genre. Hope, who has appeared in three earlier novels, is a long way from the omniscient Sherlock, and even from the suave, self-assured sleuths of the Forties. He is a lawyer with apparently an indifferent practice, and his former wife despises him…. He can't fight too well, and even an old country lawyer with diploma-mill credentials outfoxes him. Worst of all, he can't determine whodunnit without turning to the detective who also has to teach him that Marquis of Queensbury rules of pugilism are as archaic as his professional and romantic methods. Indeed, the conflict in the book is between theory and practice, between the world as he was told it would be and the way, to his discomfiture, he now finds...