Crime Wave

THE LIST OF ADRIAN MESSENGER, by Philip MacDonald (224 pp.; Crime Club; $3.50), opens with a worried author asking a Scotland Yard acquaintance to check the whereabouts of ten men--and refusing, because of British diffidence and the exigencies of plot, to say why he needs the information. A few days later, the writer dies in a mid-ocean plane crash. To armchair hawkshaws, it will be as unmistakable as a corpse on a carpet that this is not coincidence. And when it turns out that most of the men on Adrian Messenger's list have died by violent accidents, even the authorities are clever enough to make the same deduction. The pages that follow are full of top-chop cloak-and-Luger writing, and Sleuth Anthony Gethryn has some uncomfortable moments before he tracks down an adversary fully as brilliant and soulless as that slippery Conan Doyle wrongo, Professor Moriarty.

HIT AND RUN, by John Creasey (190 pp.; Scribner; $2.95), involves the Scotland Yard operative with the least probable nickname--Inspector "Handsome" West--in the most deplorable of crimes: a hit-and-run driver has aggravated the servant problem by squashing a nice old nanny at a zebra crossing. But Nanny--as proper application of the least-likely-suspect-but-one rule should make clear at the beginning--has stickied her hands with something more than spilled oatmeal. The evildoers sin vigorously, and Handsome West ratiocinates like a computing machine, but despite their efforts, the book seems only a notch or two above the routine.

CONCRETE CRIME, by Manning Coles (191 pp.; Crime Club; $2.95), places Tommy Hambledon, the British Foreign Office's top raincoat man, in grave danger of being submersed in a barrel of water, sand, and quick-hardening cement. But the henchman who intends to put him there makes a false hench, and guess who ends in the barrel? The trail leads to Paris, then Dijon and points worse. Author Coles's story is diverting enough, even if some of his swashes are carelessly buckled.

SLEEP LONG, MY LOVE, by Hillary Waugh (192 pp.; Crime Club; $2.95), begins with the most traditional of all detective-story discoveries: the trunk in the trunk. It takes Fred Fellows, police chief in a small Connecticut town, several chapters merely to learn the identity of the dead blonde, or even that she is a blonde, since she has been separated from her head as well as her limbs. Spying out her falsehearted lover is an even tougher problem. Clever readers may spot the lady killer a few pages before the end, but the author has marked a fine trail of misdirection aw?ay from his quite visible murderer, and recognition will come with a shock.

MURDER IN BLACK LETTER, by Poul Anderson (182 pp.; Macmillan; $3.50) presents an amateur sleuth who is a professor of Renaissance literature, a judo expert, and a nervous wreck. Black depression over the death years before of his sister overtakes him at odd moments, and, as one character says in admiration, "every couple of years Kintyre spends a few days in hell." But when a young graduate student is tortured and killed just before publishing a thesis on witches in 14th century Italy, Kintyre shakes his gloom and sniffs after the killers. Author Anderson creates a spooky San Francisco cityscape and it is to his credit that.he does not solve all of Kintyre's problems. The amateur eye gets the evil ones and the girl, but his psychosis is still blooming.

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