PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXI, 27 October 1928, Page 15

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED

Alfred Tresidder Sheppard has earned well-merited distinction as a writer of historical tales. Perhaps his best was “Brace Earth,” which was a great success and another that comes to mind was “Red Cravat.” Mr Sheppard breaks entirely new ground in “Here Comes an Old Sailor,” a Hodder and Stoughton publication. The story takes us more than seven centuries back. In a frame of history is a legend, or a piecing together of legends. We find ourselves in the age of Becket, of Coeur de Lion and of Magna Charts. A mariner, apparently drowned, is found by the monks on the beach near a famous old Kentish abbey of Eeculver. They lay him before the altar. Then follows a sequence of romantic events into which enter ma gic, witchcraft, legend and superstition. For the mariner, by some miracle, returns to life and becomes mixed up in the lives and loves and adventures of humans—men and women. It is a remarkable conception, but well carried out and quite a change front anything that we have read for some time. To Messrs Hodder and Stoughton’s cheaper edition several works by wellknown authors have been added. They include that excitingly interesting story “The Clue of the Twisted Candle” by the popular Edgar Wallace; “Chipstead of the Lone. Hand,” by Sydney Holder (an earlier adventure of “Bunny” Chipstead as told by the same author in bis thrilling tale “In the Dark”), and two novels by Margaret I’edier (acclaimed as “the Queen of Romance”): “Bitter Heritage” and “To-morrow’s Tangle,” a well-planned love story full of thrill and incident.