EASY READING

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22467, 30 July 1938, Page 18

EASY READING

VIENNA BEFORE HITLER Before Dawn. By Juliana von Stockhausen. Hodder and Stoughton. 354 pp. (8/6 net.) From W. S. Smart. Politically, this story (translated by Hilda C. Johnson) is interesting and exceptional because it develops the idea that Austria was helplessly dying, and that National Socialism and Hitler alone could save the country. For this reason, when it appeared in Vienna in the days of Chancellor Dollfuss, it was banned; and Juliana von Stockhausen and her husband. Count Gatterburg, Were obliged to leave Austria. . . . The personal story is that the nobleman. Carlo Herzogenbusch, and his wife Tontschi, who are as much embarrassed by their own inability to regulate means and modes of life as by the economic breakdown of the country. Carlo attempts to manage an estate; Tontschi, when she has time to snare from painting and sculning. attempts to manage a castle; Carlo’s aunt. Princess Britta, part-tenant and sharp critic, provides a running commentary on the general misru l e. And out of it all Carlo gradually draws the conviction that the remedy is in Berlin. It is a good story, much more amusing than substantial. ENGINEERS Dcmnstpr and Sen. Bv Maurice Griffiths. Rich and Cowan Ltd. 358 np. Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd. Mr Griffiths begins his novel extremely well, with the adventures of Nathaniel Dempster. English engineer. in the United States. Nathaniel became involved in the Civil War. notably taking part in the enterprise to cut the railway that fed a besieged Confederate town. But when peace came his aid went to the South, which had given him his wife; and he was building where he had destroyed, when disaster sent him back to England. Here the story follows first Nathaniel's career, then his son Clive’s, in the business of enginebuilders, and reaches the third generation with Clive’s son Christopher, whose faith in “Diesel engines and light, streamline coaches” lias to overcome Clive’s loyalty to the old, heavy steam locomotives. If the later pages of the book are less exciting than the earlier, they are not less workmanlike. PANDA BABA, DETECTIVE A Cloud That’s Dragonlsh. By Verrler Elwln. John Murray. 264 pp. Mr Elwin’s two previous books, “Leaves from the Jungle,” and the novel, “Phulmat of the Hills,” both reviewed here, have been delightful, imaginative transcripts from his knowledge of the Indian jungle people, the Gonds. His new story is equally good: it is, besides, quite thrilling as a detective story. For the tribal magician—a surprisingly enlightened and rational one, Panda Baba by name—prevented the superititious sacrifice of the girl Motiari, which the tribe sought to avert the destroying evil that had come Upon them, and unerringly traced ■nd exposed the human agency that

Some New Fiction

was at work. The story is good; the background of folklore and witchcraft is most skilfully touched in; and the Gonds—lively, jolly, lazy, even if shadow-haunted—are endlessly enjoyable.

SUPERINTENDENT HANNASYDE A Blunt Instrument. By Georgette Heyer. Hodder and Stoughton. 288 pp. From W. S. Smart.

Enough, perhaps, to say that this is a thundering good detective story —good from the first page through, till, eight or nine from the end, we hear one of the characters, staring at Sergeant Hemingway, answer his sarcasm, “Perhaps you know who really is the murderer?” with

the soft statement, “I alone know who is the murderer. And then both jumped. For the door had opened quietly behind them and Superintendent Hannasyde spoke: “No, . Not you alone.” And —■ — was, in fact, the double murderer, and, unsuspectedly obvious, his possession, if not his property, was the “blunt instrument” of death. This story is excellent in mechanical design and in detail. LOW LIFE They Drive by Night. By James Curtis. Jonathan Cape. 284 pp. Perhaps this story should not be reviewed under a heading like “Easy Reading”: it is hard, tough, and shocking. But if it is not read at a swift pace, as a thriller or a shocker, it will hardly be read at all. Mr Curtis drives two themes. One is the flight of the gaol-bird Shorty, who leaves prison, visits his girl, finds her murdered, and in a nanic takes the road, begging lifts from lorry drivers; and these journeys by night—the speed, the halts, the dark, the glare, the silences, the bursts of noise and jollity at the roadside cafes—are extremely vivid. The Second theme is provided by the murderer and his doings in London. Mr Curtis here creates a figure the horror of which is not very easy to shake off. Read fast, or leave it alone. 1

ENDURANCE I’Ky cf tlie World. By Elinor Mordaunt. Michael Joseph Ltd. 320 pp. Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd. Chiefly to be praised in Mrs Mordaunt’s latest novel, a very good one, is her psychological contrast between the character of Charles Fleming and his wife, the gentleman whose pride of race was not mixed with qualities of endurance, the former chorus girl whose blood and fibre answered every test. Exacting, impatient, self-indulgent, weak as he was, Fleming was not made to stand either prosperity or adversity as a farmer in Kenya. His charm, which Mrs Mordaunt fully expresses, helped to betray rather than defend him; and the climax of the book, in his public disgrace, only completes the sorry process he followed. But this is not a pitiful story: it is kept wholesome and cheerful by the contrast of Fleming’s wife and their daughter, and by vigorous sketches of the Masai, those people who, if ever any, have deserved the title of “noble savages.”

BELOVED BACHELOR John. By Irene Baird. Angus and Robertson Ltd. 212 pp.

In this story of the life of John Dorey, bachelor, Miss Baird has written a fine character study of a genuine, wholesome, lovable man. Forsaking the business career planned for him in London, John emigrates to British Columbia, there to live the simple out-door life for which his nature fits him. He does not marry because the only woman to whom he is attracted is already married. But his is not a selfish, bachelor existence. He has a gift for finding strength and courage for others out of the deep well of his own sensitive but solid nature. The author touches to warm and vivid life the characters of this simple story, which is her first.

THE DEATH ZIMBS Jackals of the Secret Service. By “Operator 1384.” Rich and Cowan Ltd. 383 pp. Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd;

The Foreign Legion has its Secret Service. The Secret Service hears about the Death Zimbs. The Death Zimbs want to overthrow the Empire— The Empire that the French have in the desert. The desert hides the stronghold of the plotters. The plotters here entrap the secret agents. The secret agents, though, escape and triumph. And triumph brings reward to these brave fellows?— Brave fellows, they get sixpence* from the Colonel! The Colonel says that they can have a beano. A beano’s something, in the Foreign Legion. . . . ♦Sixpence, or thereabouts: two hundredtranc notes.

BIFF AND NETTA Own Wilderness. By N. Warner Hooke. Putnam. 309 pp.

Miss Warner Hooke in this third novel closes the series begun in “Striplings” and continued in “Close of Play” and she brings to tHeir final parting the lives of Biff Tamlin and his half-sister Netta. Readers who know the first two books will know the keen, queer flavour of the author’s humour and will have enjoyed the odd reality of her two characters

and their experiences. It is that odd reality which in this last book connects the comedy of the earlier passages, in which Netta and Biff are absurdly environed by suburbia, and th'e tragic pathos of the later ones, when they return forlornly to their old home and there are carried to the solution of their last problem together.