NEW NOVELS

Press, Volume LXIX, Issue 21034, 9 December 1933, Page 17

NEW NOVELS

NOT A DETECTIVE STORY Four Days' Wonder. By A. A. Milne. Methuen. (i) From the Literary Supplement of "The Times": Inspector Marigold! It is a lair inference from the name found on an early page that in "Four Days Wonder" Mr A. A. Milne is conforming to the demands of the Merary market by supplying a detective story but that he would have it understood that there are limit's to the concessions of a man j of refinement. . He sets to and at once gives us a corpse—as we like such things. It is the corpseof an Aunt (nasty). discovered in an empty house by a " ie^ e ,. ® „ None of us is so ignorant but tnat we know that while it is easy to make a •corpse it is difficult to dispose of it and we come to think of the corpsemaking Mr Milne as being caught out in the end because the thing polluted the literary atmosphere. . There are also technical difficulties in the task he has set himself. His main trouble is that policemen from the vasty deep of Scoland Yard do come if called by an author with a corpse for bait; ana that with the resulting . detective story in the way he has invited his readers to interest themselves for some 300 pages in, say, a pastoral. His structural arch of detection is concealed in a decorative coat of stucco that has little organic relation to it. To enjoy the book one must forget the structure in the decorations which are elegant and gay. What did Jenny Windell, the niece, do when she came on the corpse ox Aunt Jane ? She broke the first detective rule —the one about finders leaving corpses as they find them. Any girl of eighteen might do that. Then she mopped up some blood on her handkerchief and threw away the handkerchief —well, it has been said she was a nice girl . . . But this is the last concession to the realists, rhc impression made by the next act lias something of St. Ursula tripping across the mountains. Jenny behaves as if she were very very young; she takes to the fields, having previously equipped her: at an emporium 101 hikers; she gets challenged by a tramp; she sleeps on a haystack, oddly enough she appears to be enjoying every'moment of it, and when she really wants breakfast she meets an artist who supplies it. As Jenny, who was quite practical in some ways, knew she had to have money for her ilight from the police, Mr Milno gives us a second movement based on her watch. It cannot be explained here how the pompous novelist, Mr Archibald Fenton, was beguiled into taking it to a pawnbroker; nor how Mr Milne shows him ip. It is all capital fun without any malice in it. But it is a nuisance that corpses hang about so. (ii) A letter from Mr A. A. Milne to the Literary Supplement of "The Times Sir, —Your reviewer writes : Inspector Marigold! It is a fair inference from the name . . . that Mr A. A. Milne is conforming to the demands of the literary market by supplying a detective story, but that he would have it understood that

there are limits to the concessions of

a man of refinement. It seems a good deal to infer from one name, but, as we know: Ex pedc Hcrculcm. In this case, however, your reviewer started off from the wrong foot. Inspector Marigold entered this troubled literary life as Inspector Marsh, and still so lives in a hundred pages of manuscript. What your reviewer would have inferred (fairly, of course) if Inspector Marsh had got between covers I do not know ; but the correct inference to be drawn from his public appearance as Inspector Marigold is that I had a sudden apprehension of one of those fantastic libel actions which form the recurring nightmare of authors. So, by an association of thought which perhaps I need not explain, I changed the comparatively common name of Marsh into the comparatively uncommon name of Marigold. It is a small matter, of course, and in mentioning it I am challenging the authenticity of no more than the foot of Hercules. Quite possibly your reviewer began from the other end ; and, having decided for his own reasons that I spend my life " conforming to the demands of the literary market" by supplying something distasteful to myself as a self-styled "man of refinement," he worked the foot in afterwards to meet the main body of his argument. Don't let us quarrel about that. The world of letters would be a very dull place if one could not make these casual assumptions of literary prostitution. What really hurts me is that I, of all people, should be accused of prostituting the detective story ; I, who belong to a club, small, select — indeed, almost refined—which only exists in order to keep the detective story pure. No, Sir ; when I " supply " a detective story, I supply the genuine article. So far, owing to the demands of the literary market (or something), I have only supplied one. The latest consignment of words upon which your Mr Smith has just checked up must have been forwarded to the wrong department. It is not a detective story. Yours faithfully, A. A. MILNE, (iii) From "Now We Are Grownup" (unpublished): Christopher Robin is saying his prayers, Christopher Robin is praying upstairs For Daddy who has so much to endure At the hands of the dunderhead book-reviewer. INDIA So A Poor Ghost. Edward Thompson. Macmillan. 311 pp.

Mr Thompson is an admirable writer, a stylist indeed, and one whose authority to write about India is not that of mere " firsthand information" but of intellectual and spiritual understanding. Yet this novel is oddly disappointing ; and the reason perhaps is that he harries the reader with small pieces of evidence and a perpetual, unspoken " You see ?" "You simply can't g-ct at the Oriental mind," said Mrs WrennBarratt. "It simply—well, it simply can't be done, that's all you can say about it. No one has ever managed to do it, not even Kipling. And no one ever will manage to do it! 'East is Easfi and West is West, and the two shall never meet,'" she concluded. That sort of thing; or this—

| "Yes," Sir John continued. "But that wasn't all. This fellow Rattray's a I meddling sort of fellow. And just after the War" (he did not even remember the year, of what had been bitten so deeply into millions, in ineradicable memories of starvation!) "there was what these Nationalists called a famine. But the truth is, they don't know what a famine is, nowadays .. . Just a shortage—especially in certain parts. But these fellows called it a famine. In his college vacation Rattray took it on himself to do relief work outside his own particular place and job, and gofi all excited. I suppose," the Rhino philosophised, "if you haven't had experience you don't know how to see things in proportion."

This meddlesome Rattray had resigned ; and it is his return to India, after many years, to act as personal adviser to the Maharana of Giansi, that gives the book its dramatic movement. Perhaps such an event, which seems rather trivial, adequately symbolises India's spontaneous effort to fit herself for the way of freedom. Perhaps it is a legitimate irony to swing the power of central Government against Rattray and defeat him. But it can be neither good symbolism nor good irony to make Rattray the frustrated intellectual that he is. j

HISTORICAL FANTASY A Rose for Scotland. By Alfred Tresidder Sheppard and Roderick MacLeod. Hodder and Stoughton. 351 pp. From W. S. Smart.

The theme of Mr Sheppard's latest historical romance—Mr MacLeod suggested and outlined the plot—is provided by the marriage of Henry Vll.'s daughter Margaret to James of Scotland ; and nobody will be so captious as to frown upon the tricks and devices which made this, as the foreword says, "an historical fantasy rather than an historical novel." For the moment it is exceedingly pleasant to accept the fiction which shows us the princess riding to a political marriage and finding, ever so strangely, a romantic one ; nor does the fiction pull history away. As usual, Mr Sheppard is at home in his period and on good terms with the authorities, while he blows an animating breath into the flat figures of the text-books and fills them out marvellously. Margaret is charming, her father a thoroughly credible 'Tudor, and James a very taking royal gallant. But Mr Sheppard has reserved his best magic for the figure of Dunbar, the King's rhymer, who goes to London to offer his master's heart by proxy and loses his own in earnest.