SOME RECENT FICTION

Dominion, Volume 9, Issue 2812, 1 July 1916, Page 6

SOME RECENT FICTION

The Dsvil Doctor. In "The Devil Doctor" (Methuen and Co.), Mr. Sax Eohmer resurrects that: grim figure, Dr. ttu Mancliu, the mysterious Chinaman wlio bas figured in previous stories by the some writer. In the present collection the diabolicallyclever Asiatic finds liis villainous plans thwarted by an ex-Burmese Civil Servant, Nayland Smith, to whose "Slierlook Holmes" a young Londoner, Dr. Petric, plays the convenient role of "Watson." Mr. Bobmer's stories, however, are strikingly original, and neither Conan Doyle, nor those old .favourites of mine, the Frenchmen, (raboriau and De Boisgobey, could liave given Mr. Rohmer points in tlio ingenuity with which a mystoiy. is, first concocted, then entangled with seemingly unbreakable chains, and finally solved in Hie most convincing of waj's. " Fu Manchu 'himself, with his green eyes, his Leocq-liko capacity for disguise, and his strange occult powers, which ho accompanies by a deop knowledge of modern chemistry and physics, is a character who stands quite alone in "detectivo" fiction. Tremendously thrilling, here and there, mavbe, a littlo horrible, but essentially readable, aro Mr. Rohmer's latest stories. The Enemy. Ono would hardly have expected a tern, peianoe story from tho author of "Got llioh Wallingford," but . in collaboration.

with his wife, Mr. George Randolph Chester has written" in'"The Euoiny" (Mills and Boon; Whitcombe and Tombs) a novel lvluoh not only possesses a strong and pretty sentimental interest, but which' is a clever and impressive attack lipan the dangers of the whisky habit. -The hero is a young and brilliantly gifted civil- engineer and architect, who, working at high pressure, and being naturally of a. sociable and convivial nature, ■ gradually '• lets • driuk . get the better of him. Two girls, play prominent parts in Hilly; Lane's; degradation ,and rescue. One is the daughter of a once great engineer, who goes under througn drink, becomes a broken-down i loafer, and is rescued-and befriended by the hero; Ujo other, a girl in good spcioty, is so bewrought by love aud jealousy that, by the basest of tricks she deliberately'plots the, "falling; back" of the temporarily reformed Billy. .The latter has a long and desperate tight before ho finally overcomes .the enemy, but, as the Americans say, he; "wins through" in the end. "The Enemy" .deserves a place alongside Chambers's "Fighting Chance" and Jack London's "John Barloyoorn" as a powerful and thought-pro-voking attack on the drink habit. The illustrations, by A. are excellent. Some Russian Stories, There is no excuse nowadays, for English ignorance, of Russian fiction, for the .publishers appear to bo vying, with each other iii producing: translations of the works of Dostoviesky, Kurin, Tchekoff, 'Qorky,'Turgehiev, and other . Russian novelists. Mr. P. Werner Laurie now. gives a..translation,.;by Claud: Field, of "The, Mantle and Other Stories," by Nicholas Gogol," of whose longer .and well--Ichown novel, "Dead ' Souls,"' a lengthy rreview recently appeared in these colurnnß. ■ An. introductory essay by Prosper Meriraeo (the author of "Carmen") igives some interesting: particulars of Go-, gol's work. Tho great French novelist and critic specially.; praises,' Gogol's art as a "painter of manners,"/'holding him, in this' Tespect, "akin to Teniers . and Cfallot," One .quality, not always apparent in Russian fiction, but frequently evidenced in. Gogol's stories, is humour.; Sometimes, as in' "Dead Souls" and in "The Nose," one of the stories included in the collection under notice, this humour is quite Diokensiar. in character. But Gogol can be grim enough at times, as witness his "Memoirs of a Madman" in this volume, which might have been written by Dostoviesky.