IN PURSUIT OF EVIL

Herr Keppel tells his own story, a manuscript of confession. In Switzerland after WWII, he's growing soft and bored with himself as a junior exec in a candymaker's firm. He supplies his own aura of status and mystery to slightly dis-believing friends by pretending to be an undercover agent of the government or the police. His fiancee is a married woman living apart from her husband. At one and the same time, she awaits her divorce and Keppel's child. Then, the coronary case husband obligingly dies. Keppel, to help, disposes of the dead man's effects, and he stumbles on a homosexual affair the man had been carrying on. Keppel's driving need to meddle in the name of detection leads him to deduce a murder where a natural death has been recorded. Smugly, he solves it. He's wrong. By his own doing, he brings his fiancee, the murderer, to arrest. She aborts in prison and dies as the result. The poseur is disrobed by his own hand. Mills spun the lacy ironies of Prudence and the Pill. (1966). The laughter here is less indulgent. It's a crafted story of psychology and suspense. Short, tart and preeminently readable.