It’s a closed-circle mystery on a yacht: Roger Mills, a noted Harley Street physician who also owns the yacht in question, is shot through the heart. But who’s to blame? One of the party, Ian Capel, brings in his friend Finbow to conduct an unofficial investigation in parallel with the police inquiry. This was a serviceable crime novel, one of those ones with diagrams and maps if you like that sort of thing, and constantly shifting ideas of whodunnit. ( )

C.P. Snow wrote this aged 26 as his first novel, and it was successful enough he was offered the chance to become a detective story writer. Personally, I am not wild about it. It is a classic small-group mystery of the period, but with the six suspects on as houseboat instead of a snowbound stately mansion. The rather unpleasant "skipper' of the houseboat is shot at the wheel. Rather improbably, the pov character (allegedly 62, though the 26 year old snow's attempt at an elderly voice is not as convincing, as, say, Buchan's in Mountain Meadow when he really was old and sick) persuades everyone to pledge secrecy if one of them will confess, but no one does, so a policeman named Birrell and a non-policefriend of the pov character named Finbow are called in. ( )

An oddly stilted detective novel. Six 'friends' are on a boating holiday, one is murdered. In a peculiarly English fashion, the six agree to stay in a nearby house (complete with angry cook) while the investigation proceeds. This is conducted by an apparently bumbling local policeman and an astute friend of the narrator who comes to join the group at his invitation. One of the oddities of this book is that the group are left to their own devices. Some of them come and go as they will as the days go by. The narrator's friend is like Sherlock Holmes to his Watson. There is a curiously emotionless tone to the book, an alienation and distance from all of the characters, so that I didn't particularly care who the culprit was (though the narrator did). As it turned out, my initial guess as to the murderer's identity was correct. An odd set-piece detective novel, simultaneously tongue-in-cheek (numerous references to other crime fiction writers) and trying to be clever. It was readable, but not great. ( )

This is one of Snow's very first books. It's a mystery novel., He didn't write another one until the end of his career. And there's no mystery to that. ( )