THE VALENTINE ESTATE

Even the chase-hardened admirers of Mr. Ellin will have trouble keeping up with this ulcerating rowdydow let alone remembering what has happened by the time it's over. Still he's a good enough writer to retain the reader's attention through the exhausting procedures which, sketchily reassembled, seem to begin with the arranged marriage of one Chris Monte, a washed up tennis bum, and Elizabeth Jones, who offers him a dowry of fifty thousand dollars on her inheritance of the Valentine estate. Then there are all sorts of interested claimants and assailants--the man she worked for who has subsidized her mother (in an institution); a Syndicate representative who seems to be the money man behind the deal; and assorted killers from Miami to London where both the identity of the deceased and the existence of the estate seem highly conjectural. Mr. Ellin, like many other strong-armed practitioners of the genre from Chandler to Fleming, can clobber rather than con you into submission so you might as well enjoy it. At that, you probably will.