A PRIZE-WINNING NOVEL AND OTHERS

Press, Volume LXXV, Issue 22769, 22 July 1939, Page 18

A PRIZE-WINNING NOVEL AND OTHERS

A PRIZE NOVEL Roughanapes. By William McDowell. Hodder and Stoughton. 383 pp. (8/6 net.) From W. S. Smart. “Roughanapes” won for Mr McDowell the publishers’ handsome prize for a first novel. Readers will give it ungrudging applause. It offers them much. Brian Forbes, son of a North of England tradesman, would have escaped, if he could, the sort of future opened to him by environment and estate; his impulses directed him towards art. But the boy had to yield to the stronger forces that carried him to the great shipyards of Garrow, where Mr McDowell has very good scenes of building and launching. Here, also, Brian fell in love, boy as he was, with the small girl who christened the new destroyer Avenger and sent her down the ways to the water, and here he developed his powers—rather sketchily indicated—as an inventor. But many years intervene before Mr McDowell closes the wide distance between Brian and Dorice, who “all her life had felt a mind searching for hers” and now knew it for his; and of those years the book makes a very generous sort of episodical hold-all. There is little subtlety about the story, but it has warmth and vigour, YOUNG WIFE Wisdom’s Gate. By Margaret Ayer Barnes. Jonathan Cape. Pp. Through Simpson and Williams Ltd. A fearful emotional strain might be expected in a novel which occuyoung woman, divorced from a first husband, with the problems Of a second marriage: children growing up, a husband of incorrigibly versatile charm, and the disturbing presence—and responsibility—of his former wife and her own former husband. Perhaps the excess and the artificiality of these complications will assure the reader, implicitly, that Mrs Barnes’s touch is not heavy. She is serious enough: Cicily Lancaster’s domestic situation is not exploited “pour rire.” But the seriousness is that of a witty observer of contemporary types, too sophisticated to be deeply moving and —almost— to be deeply moved. AUSTRALIAN BACKBLOCKS NOVEL Mountain Fiat. By Leonard Mann. Jonathan Cape. 285 pp. Leonard Mann has written a very good novel, his scene being a dying backblocks settlement on an old goldfield in Victoria, where he finds his theme in the struggles of the few remaining inhabitants to make a frugal living from the poor soil, once worked only for its precious gold. The settlement contains a mixture of nationalities but intermarriage and community of interest hold them together till the hunger for land and personal animosities arising from it cause an inevitable cleavage. Mr Mann gives the impression that he is writing about real people and the environment he creates about them certainly bears the stamp of reality. The plot is well integrated and the characters strongly and surely drawn. STEWARD I Gangway Down! By Dave Marlowe. George G. Harrap and Co. Ltd. 331 pp. (8/6 net.) Mr Marlowe’s . autobiography, “Coming, Sir,” reviewed here some time ago, will not have been forgotten by any who read it. The life of the waiter in hotels, boardinghouses, and on special jobs at large balls and the life of the steward on liners and cruise ships were depicted with a realistic force both humorous and disturbing; and episodes drawn from the bootlegging period, when many an Atlantic steward turned smuggler, with risks and profits high, were specially good. In his first novel Mr Marlowe makes excellent use of similar first-hand material. Johnnie Carson, an orphan brought up by his dockside grandmother and her friend Deadloss, a ship’s steward, runs counter to their plans of saving him from the hard life of the sea for the cosy life of a clerk. To the sea he goes, living in the heat and squalor of the “glory hole,” serving amid contrasted luxury, finding adventures very like Mr Marlowe’s -own. In the end, having known the fear and bitterness of unemployment, Johnnie faces in a seamen’s strike a problem of motives in conflict and responds to a call on his deepest loyalty. The book has plenty of substance, from end to end. IN SEARCH OF BEAUTY This Porcelain Clay. By Naomi Jacob. Hutchinson and Co. 376 pp. (8s 6d net.) Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd.

• Louis Silver, son of an illiterate man who made a fortune, lost it, and then died by his own hand, determined to succeed in life at all costs. He succeeded by ruthless and sometimes unscrupulous methods in making a great deal of money, but his achieverhent left him a cold,.embittered, cynical man, enduring a life without interest and a marriage without love. A chance acquaintance set him groping after a dimly seen vision of beauty, under the handicaps of a man whose nature has hardened in the pursuit of material ends. Gradually the change is worked that regains for him the love of his wife and brings him near the attainment of happiness. Miss Jacob describes Silver's struggle with sympathetic insight.

DR. BISHOPSFORD’S ADVICE Family Life. By Chester Mordant. Geoffrey Bles. 263 pp. Mr Mordant is very clever at this sort of story, in which* an eminently successful man of business finds his self-confidence badly shaken by his failure to achieve equivalent success in managing his emotional life. His mistress and his wife both coolly lay down their terms to him instead of accepting his, and as coolly leave him to choose his own way out of the complications for which he is responsible; and it is a sick and humble man who is rescued from them by Dr. Bishopsford’s wise advice to the wise young wife. STUDY IN REMORSE Worlds Not Realised. By Hester Shepherd. Hodder and Stoughton. 320 pp. From W. S. Smart. Miss Shepherd has previously shown her interest in problems of character and conscience. Her second novel develops the problem of Esme Holt, who surrenders, in his need, to the temptation to rob a man whom he takes to be dying or dead and to leave the body where it lies, by the wayside. Remorse comes too late, when it is useless to return; but it works out a strange, distressful experience for Holt when he learns that the employer whose private secretary he becomes is the stranger he robbed and aßandoned. FUN AT A HOUSE PARTY The Haunted Salt. By Nelson Mapple. Hunt and Blackett. 320 pp. The scene of this uproarious farce is laid at the Loose Box, country home of Sir George Halloburt, millionaire, who has gathered a curiously mixed house party about him. The absurd misfortunes df one of the guests, Mr Wintle, J.P., honorary secretary of the Home for Difficult Girls, arise from his having unknowingly acquired a haunted suit, which, while its owner is absent, commits numberless indiscretions, quite out of character but laid to his charge. It even steals a fabulously valuable piece of radium from Sir George’s safe, thereby confounding a gang of thieves, some of whom are guests in the house. The solution of this mystery by handsome Bill Brentford of the Criminal Investigation Departmenl is reached after wildly laughable adventures. DETECTIVE NAPOLEON BONAPARTE i The Mystery of Swordfish Reef. By Arthur W. Upfield, Angus and Robertson Ltd. 236 pp. . (65.) Another Upfield thriller exhibits lovable Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, half-caste aboriginal and man of many parts, in a new environment. A launch engaged for swordfishing off the south coast of New South Wales mysteriously disappears. Subsequently the bulletholed head of the man who hired the launch is recovered in a trawling net. Away from his native bush Napoleon Bonaparte is as painstaking and efficient as ever in tracking down the murderers. Mr Upfield also describes fights with giant swordfish; and these are just as exciting as his mystery story. PERFECT MURDER So Many Doors. By Anne Hocking. Geoffrey Bles. 283 pp. A new attack on the solution of a murder mystery is presented in this well-written story. The author makes the reader a present of the perfect murder plot, together with the perfect flaw, and then, until the last chapter, keeps the reader guessing who committed the murder and who made the fatal mistake. Love interest, between a woman writer of detective fiction and a handsome young detective-inspector, is neatly introduced.

“RITZY” TYLER AGAIN Green for Danger. By Gavin Holt. Victor Gollanoz Ltd. 286 pp. Mr Gavin Holt enlivens with plenty of wise-cracking dialogue his new story of “Ritzy” Tyler, the talkative (if otherwise dumb) Watson, and his chief, the private detective Joel Saber. The solution of the murder mystery is secondary to Mr Tyler’s experiences while he is travelling round missing the obvious by *yards at every shot. PIRATE FILM Galleon Kock, By Gordon Volk. Robert Hale Ltd. 280 pp. Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd. Mr Volk beats no end of excitement out of a story in which a ragtag crew assembled to act a piracy scene on the high seas for a film turn pirates in earnest. Their aim is to capture the star actor-producer s yacht and use it to raid Galleon Rock, the ocean hide-out and treasury of a millionaire and his wife, fugitives from justice; and the loyal servants of this pair share with the loyal officers of the yacht the changing fortunes of blood-spattered days. WHERE EDGAR WALLACE LEFT OFF The Law of the River. By Franclg Gerard. Rich and Cowan. 286 pp. Through Whitcombe and Tombs, Ltd. Those who think that Edgar Wallace’s best work was done in the African stories, and regret that there were not more of them, will thank Mr Gerard for taking up Commissioner Sanders, Hamilton, and “Bones” where Wallace left off and writing a new set of stories about them. This is the second volume of these experiments and they are very well done. DEKOBRA LEAVES EUROPE Stars and Strips. By Maurice Dekobra. T. Werner Laurie Ltd. 242 pp. Mr Dekobra in this book leaves his familiar Europe and, in the United States, runs his swift, shrewd eye over the surfaces of life as chorus girls, taxi-dancers, racketeers, gunmen, and gigolos know it.

CHILDHOOD, Kind Relations. By Robert Liddell. Jonathan Cape. 285 pp. Through Simpson and Williams Ltd. Readers who enjoy, say, such books about children and childhood as “Bevis” or Mary McHugh’s “Thalassa”-—two very different examples of the same sort of exquisite objectivity, without false drama or sentimentalism—may be advised, indeed urged, if not implored, to read Mr Liddell’s admirable story. There are few books of this excellent sort; “Kind Relations” has a clear right to the classification. The small boy, Andrew, grows from childish to boyish years during the Great War. His mother dead, his father at the front, he spends his time in the homes of various aunts. These, a smaller brother, some young relations, and his nurse are the other characters who chiefly figure in- a tale of days made up of trifles, though of trifles behind which, heard in mutters and rumours of war, lies the grim world. It is in the clarity and liveliness of small events, small things, rescaled to their proper Importance in the child’s sense of reality and the child’s imagination, that Mr Liddell succeeds where not many have succeeded. This book is not fanciful, not whimsical; it is charming, but it is real. It applies, in an artist’s way, the old tag about “maxima reverentla." EGYPTIAN RHAPSODY X Too Have Loved. By Denise Robins. Nicholson and Watson. 314 pp. 1 Through Whltoombe and Tombs Ltd. “An Egyptian Rhapsody,” the publishers say, might be the title of Miss Robins’s latest romance. They are not just saying that. This is the story of a woman, unhappy in her marriage, swept away at last by the strength of her love for a man years younger, and > then brought bitterly to know the jealous fears of a wife facing a youthful rival. Miss Robins carries the book to a close in which tragedy is not left without corisolation and hope.