ALLURING HEROINES

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22540, 3 October 1936, Page 4 (Supplement)

ALLURING HEROINES

MR. J. L. HARDY'S NEW NOVEL With his successive books, " I Escape," " Everything is Thunder " and " Never in Vain," Mr. J. L. Hardy has made the literature of escape and espionage peculiarly his own. It is only necessary to state that his new book, " liecoil," is up to the same high standard to ensure it a warm welcome. Mideuria is a small state somewhere on the border of Germany and Russia. Siding with the Allies in the Great War, it had taken advantage of their ascendancy to seize and occupy a German province. The large German population, though conquered, was never subdued, and always looked with fanatical eyes toward the Fatherland, and with eyes of hate on their uncultured rulers. Thus Mideuria became a land of plots, .terrorism and street fighting. Its head at the time of the story was a famous scientist, Novak, and the hero of " Recoil " was a certain Captain Stranard, whose job it was to discover and circumvent German plots against the government. But the secret of Mr. Hardy's success is the facile way ho can make the reader believe in his "women. For they aro always women living questionable lives in the midst of depravity, who yet remain subtly alluring creatures, capable of noble impulses. It is no use trying to resist them, and say that such things cannot bo. Mr. Hardy soon makes you want to believo in them. Renate was a girl employed to danco with patrons in a night club; she was ignorant, common and—subtle stroke this—short-sighted, yet she made Stranard forget for the moment his innocent young wife, mado Novak ignore the laws of his country, and it will be a cold-blooded reader who will not be won over to her green-eyed insolence and frail beauty. Notwithstanding all she had experienced, it is her influence that gives back to the men the standards they were in danger of deserting. The book abounds in exciting and dramatic moments, which are arrived at without undue strain on probabilities. " Itecoil," by J. L. Ilardy. (Collins.) i