Death in January

THE NEW ADVENTURES OF ELLERY QUEEN --Ellery Queen--Stokes ($2). Eight snappy, compact short stories and one novelette, reprinted from magazines dating back to 1935. As good Queen as there is, and mighty handy at the bedside.

THE NORTHS MEET MURDER--Frances and Richard Lockridge--Sfokes ($2).

A lovely couple, the Norths, who plot mild whoopee in a vacant apartment upstairs in Greenwich Village, find a corpse in the bathtub, but have their party anyway. Mrs. North and Lieutenant Weigand together spot the guilty.

THE AFRICAN POISON MURDERS --Elspeth Huxley*-- Harper ($2). This one has everything, including literary quality. Herr Munson, a nauseous Nazi farmer on the veldt, is paid off in a native African poison. Inspector Vachell can't understand the mutilated ducks and dogs, and the reader gets the creeps.

OVER MY DEAD BODY--Rex Stout--Farrar & Rinehart ($2). Nero Wolfe, who once fought in the Montenegrin Army, has a bit of a time with Balkan intrigue and a couple of quaintly accented lovelies named Lovchen and Tormic. One of them is probably his daughter; either might have murdered one of the fencers at a Manhattan salle d'armes. Archie Goodwin does all the work hvala Bogu (thank God).

A PICTURE OF THE VICTIM--John Stephen Strange -- Crime Club ($2). News photographers don't actually get paid enough to indulge in such plushy deductions as Barney Gantt's. He does a grand job at a surprise Long Island wedding where the gun went off on the way to the altar and left the chorus girl waiting.

SHADOWS BEFORE--Dorothy Bowers--Crime Club ($2). The old reliable weedkiller roams again. Inspector Pardoe takes a complicated family apart in an intricate but well-turned English mystery revolving about Mr. Matthew Weir already once acquitted of arsenical behavior.

*Cousin-by-marriage to the famous Huxleys (TIME, Jan. 29).

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