PUBLIC LIBRARIES

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 103, 28 October 1939, Page 19

PUBLIC LIBRARIES

The City Librarian has chosen "Quality Chase," by M. H. Tiltman, as the book of the week, and has furnished .the following review:—

Miss Marjorie Hessell Tiltman has written a fine story of the English Midlands. Jonathan Chase was born' in Birmingham in the seventies, the son of a rag and bone man. From these humble beginnings, by dint of perserverance and those strokes of good fortune which came to him, he built up for himself a business in London as an art dealer and became not only successful but celebrated as a fine connoisseur of antiques. The story is not simply the study of one character, and among the subsidiary people of the book may be mentioned John Bright and Joseph Chamberlain, who appear in all the glory of their campaigning vigour. Chase is something of a bluffer and more than once his career is in danger of being wrecked. He has, as most tradespeople have, to combine the love of the actual work which he is doing and of the things which he handles with the business side, and it is the latter aspect which provides him with the bulk of his adventures. His love affairs are minor incidents in his life, but towards the end of his career he fb.ds comfort and companionship in his.daughter, who indeed saves him from financial disaster by her marriage with a wealthy connoisseur, which saves him from the result of a bad investment. At the end of the book he can still hold his head high. The story is an interesting and most attractive analysis of the Birmingham of the nineties, and the historical background is as completely arid delicately etched as one would have expected from Miss Tiltman,