THE NEW FICTION

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25364, 23 October 1943, Page 3

THE NEW FICTION

Literature

It Began In New York. By Milward Kennedy (Gollancz); 10s. Welcome. Isabel C. Clarke (Hutchison); 10s. Pirates May Fly. By " Sinbad" (Hale); 10s. New York-Lisbon-London Milward Kennedy’s new thriller Is almost first class. The hero, a middleaged English Industrialist, visiting America on an important but not vital business mission, is a likeable and not too heroic person; the seductive young creature who shares some of his adventures is worth encountering. These adventures commence in an hotel in New York with the discovery of a spare corpse around the bedrooms and corridors, and are continued in Canada, Bermudas, Lisbon, Eire, with a happy outcome in London. Mr Kennedy explains in a note that while the story is fiction strictly, he made by air the journey he describes, at the very time immediately before and after the Pearl Harbour attack which gives to the book its chronology. The details of plane-catching and plane-waiting, which in themselves are interesting, may therefore be accepted as authentic. Jamaican Setting

In Mandeville. Jamaica, where she took up residence after her adventures as an evacuee from France and Italy in 1940, Isobel C. Clarke has written a novel with Ihe controversial colony as mise en scene. Welcome is the name of Paul Probyn’s sugar plantation, and, besides telling a romantic story of Paul’s love for Karen Adair, the author contrives to provide her readers with a brightly-coloured picture of life on this ancestral estate. Paul’s young brother. Nicky, beautiful and spoiled, returns from Oxford to take Karen away from the quieter, more conscientious Paul, and the conflict between the brothers, ending in a deeper understanding upon a devout Catholic, basis, forms the main theme of the story. Our copy is from Whitcombe and Tombs. Modern Piracy An ingenious and well-developed affer-this-war variation on the super-highway-man theme is “ Sinbad's ” Pirates May Fly. It is the belief of the commander of the great liner Luxurla that the last pirate died when liners achieved a speed of 30 knots. Lime, a scientist, and four men of action collaborate in a plot to correct this view, using the latest development in long-distance aircraft as their pirate vessel and holding up the Luxuria at sea, to remove from it a fortune in gold bullion. So far, so good; but the efforts of,, the men to divide and make use of their wealth lead only to disaster, including shipwreck (a subject “Sinbad ’’ deals with very well*, with Lime returning to the scene of his marauding at last a sadder but certainly not a wiser man. Our copy of this book is from Whitcombe arid Tombs.