152
PARTISAN REVIEW
you see, a box of chocolates is sent to Sir Eustace Pennefather, who,
not having a sweet tooth, gives them to his fellow club member
Graham Bendix, who gives them to his wife, who eats them and
dies.
From today's
Times
I gather that his year's candy caper culprit
was careless enough to leave his fingerprint on the box of chocolates.
Since the fingerprint matches up with that of the anthropology pro–
fessor Judge Brieant sent to prison six years ago, the police seem to
have an open-and-shut case on their hands. This is, of course, where
the classic puzzler has it all over the stuff of the headlines. In
Berkeley's
Poisoned Chocolates Case,
we get not one putative solution
but six of them in turn, as each member of London's Crimes Circle
Club takes a crack at the case . Each solution erases the last; the
whole stands as a kind of epistemological parable, proving that dif–
ferent detective methods produce different results. But the ingenuity
of the solutions gives a pleasure beyond this academic point. It is a
good example of the perfect murder, not because it is insoluble, but
because it has been so artistically conceived.
DAVID LEHMAN
YOUNG MAN LUKAcs
GEORG LUKACS: SELECTED CORRESPONDENCE, 1902-1920.
Selected, edited, translated, and annotated
by
Judith Marcus and
Zoltan Tar. Columbia University Press. $25.00.
On the day the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, Georg
Lukacs entrusted a large wooden suitcase to the Deutsche Bank of
Heidelberg. After five years in Germany, he had decided to retreat
to his native Hungary, where, at a safe distance from his unstable
wife and her deranged lover, he would be able to work in peace. It
was wartime, and he did not want to run the risk oflosing the several
manuscripts and almost sixteen hundred letters that he had amassed
over the years. He could reclaim them when, at war's end, he re–
settled in the city on the Neckar and resumed his quest for an aca–
demic appointment. Fate, however, was soon to intervene. In
December 1918, he joined the newly-organized Hungarian Com–
munist Party, and when he did return to Germany in 1931, it was as
