After the Finer Hour

SOMEBODY AT THE DOOR--Raymond Postgate--Knopf ($2).

Croxburn was a bleak London suburb made bleaker by the Blitz. Its people--many of them -- were phlegmatic busybodies made vicious by the strain of war. In the cold winter of 1942, with the side walks filmed with ice, weary infidelities in the cold houses, grafting in the desultory municipal government, train service rotten and winter colds everywhere, murder was possible. In Croxburn it happened.

Somebody at the Door is compounded of the stories of the people involved in the murder -- Grayling, the murdered man, over 50, grey-eyed, thin, inquisitorial, cold, churchwarden, town councilor, Home Guardsman, petty grafter, a tyrant to his young and pretty wife; Renata, 38, brown-haired, self-seeking, moodily vengeful; Ransom, pickpocket, fugitive, a World War I veteran recovering his self-respect in the Battle of Britain; Mannheim, a German refugee chemist, possibly a spy, square, dark, smuggled out of Germany.

Fast-moving, complex in its interweaving of politics and crime, Somebody at the Door has the uneasy fascination of a puzzle some of whose parts are missing.

The best parts of the novel stand out so sharply that all its murder and mystery seem irrelevant. During the Blitz the village had known a finer hour. In the silence before raids the guards had met, waited and talked. The bombs jarred loose ancient reserves, buried notions of guilt, stupidities and intolerances that lost their power in the irregular hum of the bombers and the distant crump of gunfire. During the broken, hesitant confidences of night "from time to time, a sudden low flash of faintly green light would appear on the eastern horizon. . . . The searchlight beams moved and crossed and then abruptly, on some unseen order, vanished instantaneously, leaving an even deeper darkness. . . . Bright, large sparks occurred among the stars and vanished; they were bursting shells. . . ." When the Blitz was over, the village was spent, spiritually at its lowest ebb.

Whatever new was to come out of it had not appeared; the wreckage laid bare its old animosities and sins. The major criticism of Raymond Postgate's thriller is that if Croxburn is a representative English village, something is wrong with the U.S. picture of England, for these people could not stand up against anything, let alone the Luftwaffe.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.