Books: A Study in Scarlet

BOYS WILL BE BOYS (269 pp.)—E. S. Turner—Michael Joseph (10/6).

"Literature," said G. K. Chesterton, "is a luxury; fiction is a necessity . . . The simple need for some kind of ideal world in which fictitious persons play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper and older than the rules of good art, and much more important."

Last month, Britons had a chance to browse nostalgically through a loo-year history of such an "ideal world." E. S. Turner's Boys Will Be Boys is a thorough, witty and succulent investigation of the blood & thunder fiction...