With The Last of the Country House Murders we leave Life behind and begin to play the Tennant games. There is a strong Napoleonic streak in Miss Tennant, which first declared itself at the time of the crack and is now rampant once again: large armies sprout and march on; orders are expected and orders are issued; revolutions have taken place and others will follow. Whole galaxies have been swept off the skies with a few well-aimed sentences and now the Earth stands despondent and unaccompanied, but for the sun and the moon (a last-minute reprieve?), in the great chasm.

It is all, we look about apprehensively, a song of the Very Near Future. Persons like us, who only the other day were enjoying the twenties and the forties in the Orient Express, ornamental behind our famous Dorothy Lamour smiles, and resplendent underneath our Veronica Lake hair-styles, now...