[A Coat of Varnish] is a 'crime novel', but substantial in the telling…. [The] book is surely one of Lord Snow's best in any genre….

[This] whodunnit seems to me more successful in arguing artistically the issues of the day than a more orthodox roman à clef like In Their Wisdom (1974) or one of the Strangers and Brothers sequence like The Sleep of Reason….

Apart from the policemen, the characters by and large come from SW1. They are depicted with less awe and more scientific detachment than Lord Snow often brings to the well-off, eminent or well-born….

[The] realism pays a high dividend: for a great part of the book's length we are kept in doubt about the murderer's identity, even as to whether the murderer is an intruder or an 'insider', yet the suspects are far from being presented as an Agathaian line-up. Any such simplistic schema is...