Can I be altogether alone in finding [A Coat of Varnish] a cheat, a crime if you like? It uses all the devices of the detective novel only to abandon the reader in the end to uncertainty and a damp sense of inconclusiveness that resembles nothing as much as bad sex.

Snow's narrative skills are intact. The story line pulls us forward, wanting to know the answer, the reason for all the explanations, all the biographies, wanting, above all, a solution. And that, of course, is what the detective novel of whatever kind must provide. Closure may have vanished from the higher modern literature. The sense of an ending, as Frank Kermode suggests, may be in abeyance. But not in the detective story….

But what if Snow's whole point is that, civilization being but a coat of varnish, order and justice cannot be restored, the answer cannot be found, or if found, proved?…

Snow is guilty … of a particularly youthful sin: presumption. Like a demented spider with a web in which no fly is caught, Snow spins more and more plot lines as though to catch, if not a solution, at least an insight…. All of these aspects of life in Belgravia are supposed, somehow, to have been epitomized by a particularly horrible murder of an old aristocratic woman. But this murder bears (it is my chief complaint about the book) no meaningful connection to the lives of those characters unrelated to her, not even, as it happens, to the man who is supposed to have done it.

One is so annoyed and petulant, of course, because there is much that is good here…. [The] hero has all the charms of a superannuated Lewis Eliot (the protagonist of Snow's Strangers and Brothers series of novels), and his story might well have been told without the murder, and the ponderous insistence upon society's imminent demise.