OTHER NOVELS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 5, 6 January 1934, Page 2 (Supplement)

OTHER NOVELS.

THE EVIL IN SUCCESS.

Major George Cornwallis West increases tho fame of that famous family with "Fortune's Favourites" (Putnam), a history of tho winning of a great prize in tho Irish Sweep by a humble greengrocer of West London. The family is of Irish parentage, and apart from a little "drink taken" by tho father, is worthy of praise for industry. However, one son is led to assist a gang of London thieves, another joins the Communists, and one daughter —a beauty —is always in danger of personal disaster. There comes to them tho overwhelming good of a fortune, which turns to evil in unprepared uneducated hands, and brings the whole family to disaster, and two of them to death. As a character study of lower class life the story ia consistent and thorough. Tho kindly Jew, tho racing tipster, tho immoral but generous actress, the farmer and his wife, and the wholly unscrupulous aristocrat, are all clearly drawn.

Mr. Warner Allen has beaten the "thriller" merchants at their special game, and with knowledge of Italy and France, and of many vintages of value, has composed a plot in which evil doers arc time and again defeated by a wine merchant with a flair for detectivo work, whoso knowledge of wine is in each case made tho solution of a problem. "Mr. Clerihew, Wine Merchant" (Methuen) is amusing, exciting and ingenious.

I Sylvia Murray's "Lovely Lloyds" (Collins) is rather a ghostly hook, as all the lovely Lloyds are dead before the story opens, and -we only sec the effect of Lloyd temperament in descendants. The story is Irish, and more of the plough and barn than of moonlight and love, and there is so much "dog" in it that the tale wags rather than progresses. The reader must be prepared for heavy going across the Irish country, for there is not a gleam of fun or Irish wit from start to finish, nor is there one pleasant character to be remembered.

"Introducing Terry Sloanc," by Concordia Merrel (Hpdder and Stougliton) opens with a very long and full description of a girl's preparation for presentation at court, and follows the fortunes (and misfortunes) of a girl of nineteen in the higher strata of English society (big "S"), and her commercial interprettion of love and marriage. With beauty and high spirit and immeasurable conceit as sole capital she "arrives.' 5

It is to be hoped that Miss Hoult's family in "Youth Can't Bo Served"

(Heinemann) is purely fictional, for the Boyces are, without exception, disagreeable, discor tented, selfish and abnormal. The war did many things to both old and young, but surely the middle-class survivals in comfortable circumstances were not debased in character wholesale. Mr. Boyce is tyrannical and selfish; Mrs. Boyce is weak, and as weakly affectionate as weakly in authority; one daughter is lazy and self-centred; another is amorous, accepting the nearest male unquestioningly; the only son is Communistic and disobedient, but only reasonably adventurous in desiring freedom from irksome home ties. The best part of the story is the amusing canvass for voters in the slums, when the son acts in the Labour interests and meets so strange a scries of "characters," each with definite ideas, social and politioal.