Books: Detective Colt

ABOUT THE MURDER OF GERALDINE FOSTER—Anthony Abbot—Covici, Friede ($2).

A new detective makes his appearance with this mystery-murder; his author promises more later. Thatcher Colt, a combination of Grover Whalen and Philo Vance, was one of New York City’s Police Commissioners you may never have heard about. “What [he] really wanted was to be a musician and poet (in deadly privacy he applied himself to the forms of the sonnet and the villanelle and practiced cadenzas on a flute) but unfortunately nature had made him a detective and, as he once told me, with that quirkish smile of his, ‘Not even my duties as Police Commissioner shall keep me from the business of solving crimes.’ ”

A lovely girl disappears. A blood-spattered love-nest is discovered. Her fearfully hacked body is found buried in the bushes. How Thatcher Colt came to the correct but astounding solution may have staggered his district attorney but will not seem unduly out-of-the-way to hardened detective-story readers.