Books: A Slight Case of Murder

REPUTATION FOR A SONG (331 pp.)]—Edward Grierson—Knopf ($3.50).

When the prosecuting counsel opened his case for the Crown in the trial of Rupert Laurence Anderson, aged 18 and charged with murdering his father, he told the jury: "It is of small things that I shall tell, small hatreds, small jealousies, small desires."

Small people too, he might have added. Decent, ineffectual Robert Anderson was no match for his wife Laura when they began squabbling over the children. Laura hated him; she also hated their spiritless daughter Margaret, because she was so much like her father. Thanks to Laura's interventions, Margaret never even got...