The Progress of a Crime

Hugh Bennett, twenty-two years old, was a reporter for a small-town paper. His assignments were usually dull and local, and he dreamed, as did the other members of the staff, of getting up to London someday, to a job on a national paper.

When he was assigned to cover a Guy Fawkes Night story in the neighboring town of Far Wether it looked as if it would be another routine assignment, but there had lately been some local excitement in Far Wether. A group of young toughs on motorcycles had caused a disturbance at a dance in the Parish Hall and had been thrown out by the local tavern owner.

And on Guy Fawkes Night, as the flames of the bonfire shot into the air, the toughs rode back, and when they rode away, the tavern owner lay stabbed to death.

Hugh, on the spot, was both witness and reporter. The story grew to more than local interest and a top crime man was sent down from a big London paper.

Then Hugh met a girl named Jill Winter, whose brother Leslie was one of the knife-carrying youths mixed up with the murder.

Julian Symons, known and respected for his previous novels of suspense, has turned to the novel of police detection and has handled it superbly. The working police, the working press are admirably pictured, and the problems which create and are created by juvenile gangs are sympathetically explored.