SEA AND ROMANCE

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 74, 28 March 1931, Page 19

SEA AND ROMANCE

BY DALE COLLINS

His travels round the world have given Dale Collins background and colour for his new novel, "Rich And Strange." The story has liwcmeiil and. spirit, the salty tang of the sea, and the warm darkness and glamour of the tropics. The reader must judge for himself or herself -whether Uncle Harry's legacy with the string attached would or would not have had the described effect upon tho London bank clerk of 27, and the adoring little wife to whom he had been married for eight years, though she was still only 25. The legacy was £3000, and the string attached was that it must be spent on a journey, that they must "do things in style," and not come back until the last penny was gone. So they went first to Paris and to Monte Carlo, then boarded a ship en route for Singapore. Up t,o this point tho novel drags a bit, but ] ones on shipboard, Mr. Collins ia thoroughly at his ease. The novel is! not a travel book. "It's not places orj things that matter, but people," in-j sists Emily when it is all over, and Mr. Collins's first concern is with his J characters, the two who suddenly find themselves in what is to them a dream world. Yet at the same time he gives us, as he so well knows how to do, the thrill and magic of tho great ship, and the description of the shipwreck and rescue is almost without peer in fiction. "Rich and Strange" is more than a thrilling adventure story, more even than tho'tale of one who knows and loves the sea; it is a story of human beings projected suddenly into a way of living which to them is fit ojico fantastic and unreal, their mistakes, their weaknesses, and their final maturity.