THE LATEST NOVELS

Southland Times, Issue 24237, 21 September 1940, Page 9

THE LATEST NOVELS

Germans In Exile

PARIS GAZETTE. ByLionFeuchti wanger. Hutchinson and Co., London, through Whitcombe and Tombs. Price 10/6.

In a large novel filled with the tensions of pre-war Europe, Lion Feuchtwanger depicts the lives of Germans who lived as exiles in Paris. His central character is a musician named “Sepp” Trautwein, who is divided between the claims of composition and the political interests of his fellow emigres. Although he has been a casual contributor to “Paris Gazette,” a . journal published by exiled Germans, it is not until the assistant editor, Friedrich Benjamin, is kidnapped by agents of the Gestapo that he finds himself drawn actively into journalism. His passionate desire to force the Benjamin case on the attention of the world brings him into a widening circle of personalities

and events. The little world of Germans and Jews, helping one another in their poverty, or pursuing their quarrels and ambitions with a pathetic intensity, clashes with the larger world inhabited by Nazi diplomats and journalists. Herr Feuchtwanger brings all his characters close to the reader —sometimes too close, for (as in most very long novels) there are many personal reveries which could have been cut down without damaging the story. . A certain air of tragic futility is to be detected in the affairs of men and women whose lives have been separated from their roots. But the real tragedy lurks in implications of which the author remained unaware. “I am convinced,” he wrote in a postscript, “that the outcome of this war will enable me to return to Germany. .. ” A few weeks ago it was reported, in London that Lion Feuchtwanger had been seized by the Gestapo after the German occupation of France. He is in the hands of men whose brutality he has denounced in pages that now have a poignant realism.

A Problem In Murder

THE PROBLEM OF THE WIRE CAGE. By John Dickson Carr. Hamish Hamilton' London, through

Whitcombe and Tombs. Price 8/-. “The Problem of the Wire Cage” is yet another of Mr Carr’s variations on the “sealed room” theme. This time the victim is found strangled in the middle of a composition tennis court, sodden after heavy rain; there are no footprints on the court except his own, which lead from the gateway to where his body is found. The method by which he has been murdered is as inexplicable as though he had been killed inside a sealed room. But Mr Carr finds an explanation that does not put too great a strain on the reader’s credulity; and he embellishes it with his usual effects of atmosphere and shrewd characterization. Like most persons who are sacrificed to provide detective stories, Frank Dorrance is a thoroughly unpleasant fellow, and his violent death on the tennis court leaves almost all his friends and acquaintances under suspicion. His fiancee, who is the first to see his body, rushes out on to the court without realizing how her footprints will involve her. To save herself, she fakes the evidence, and in an extraordinary way her not very convincing story is supported by events. One of the suspects, of course, is a trapeze artist. Mr Carr tantalizes the reader with suggestions of wire-walking along the tennis net and gymnastics on the wire netting; but the trapeze artist becomes the murderer’s second victim, while the problem of the first is still unsolved. The story is expertly told and exciting from beginning to end. It is perhaps not as good as Mr Carr’s best, but Mr Carr’s best rank at the very top.

An Economist in Trouble

MERMAIDS SLEEP ALONE. By Winijred Agar. Michael Joseph, London, through Whitcombe and Tombs. Price 8/9.

Henry Valliant is an economist who is better at writing about money than he is at earning it. After being nagged more than usual by Prue, his wife, he decides to write a fairy tale under a pen-name. The story is a great success, and its author, “Mary Manifold,” becomes a centre of wide public interest. Henry’s efforts to continue building up the fame of “Mary,” and to convince his wife that he is not in love with a non-existent woman, are treated with humour and more than a touch of satire. His difficulties increase when he finds that a whimsical note is creeping into his economic treatises, and that some of his fairy tales are showing a trace of tartness. The struggle to maintain a dual literary personality, betrays him into an unsatisfactory love affair. And at the end it becomes clear that Henry Valliant must kill Mary Manifold, or be killed by her. The author’s solution adds a last neat touch to a clever, if at times somewhat biting, commentary on the lives and habits of sophisticated people.

Screen Favourite

THE SECRET OF DR KILDARE. By Max Brand. Hodder and Stoughton, London, through W. S. Smart,

Sydney. Price 8/3 net. Young Dr Kildare is now one of the favourite characters of the screen. His earliest adventure, during which he risked his medical career to save a "rich young woman from the effects of a chronic hysteria, is retold in these pages in an incisive prose that retains the quick movement and transitions of the cinema. Dr Gillespie (the crusty old specialist who watches jealously over Kildare’s work), pretty Nurse Lamont and the Messenger family all make their suitable appearances. The book, is copiously illustrated by “stills” from the film.