[A Coat of Varnish] is a 'crime novel', but substantial in the telling…. [The] book is surely one of Lord Snow's best in any genre….

[This] whodunnit seems to me more successful in arguing artistically the issues of the day than a more orthodox roman à clef like In Their Wisdom (1974) or one of the Strangers and Brothers sequence like The Sleep of Reason….

Apart from the policemen, the characters by and large come from SW1. They are depicted with less awe and more scientific detachment than Lord Snow often brings to the well-off, eminent or well-born….

[The] realism pays a high dividend: for a great part of the book's length we are kept in doubt about the murderer's identity, even as to whether the murderer is an intruder or an 'insider', yet the suspects are far from being presented as an Agathaian line-up. Any such simplistic schema is masked by the massive scale of the police operation, though we are agreeably conscious of the puzzle element….

[The] narrative viewpoint occasionally strays from Colonel Leigh's consciousness. The shifts are well-contrived but the purist may be faintly troubled. A few other objections are more bothersome, accentuated by the author's very conscientiousness over detail. They are mainly to do with the murder motivation machinery…. Maybe the author could allay such unease, but to my mind he fails to do so in his book, though it does contain some attempted disarming in these areas.

To return to the major investigation and interrogation already mentioned, these, like the ample prelude, if not innovatory in the crime novel surely go to a rewarding extreme. The interrogation, far from a conventional cat-and-mouse affair, acts like a coda to a musical work, twisting and turning with surprise effects even though no new motifs are introduced. It is an excellent substitute for the double kick-in-the-pants so desirable in the crime novel, but now apt to be mechanical.