LOOK BACK ON DEATH

Shame on Lesley Egan. Instead of writing a detective story to entertain with detection, she is herein using the form to proselytize for spiritualism, and that's dirty pool. Lawyer Jesse Falkenstein is hired to convince convicted murderer Dick Tredgold to accept parole; but martyr Dick refuses, insisting that he didn't kill his Aunt Lou, so Jesse tries to find out who did. He does a solid, slogging run-down of all evidence and witnesses (eight years after the fact), but the solution has nothing to do with his sleuthing: it is provided when Aunt Lou's ghost tells all through a medium. The life-after-death crowd should be pleased. Mystery fans should boycott. And Egan should take an example from A. Conan Doyle, who switched from detective stories--where logic must triumph--to Other genres when he felt the need to crusade for spiritualism.