THE NEW BOOKS

Waikato Times, Volume 118, Issue 19759, 14 December 1935, Page 20 (Supplement)

THE NEW BOOKS

BAFFLING CRIMES. | ■ — 1 f \ And Baffled Readers. “ADVICE LIMITED.” By E. Phillips Oppenheim. (Plodder and Stoughton.) One imagines that one of the main difficulties of writing detective stories is the invention of new eccentricities for the detective. The time is long pa3t when the detectives of fiction were invariably lean, hawk-nosed, big-chinned, and steely-eyed. Now they are as likely as not to be maiden aunts, or suburban curates. Mr Oppenheim’s latest is an excessively beautiful Hungarian baroness. Her chief foible is her secretiveness. “My dear colonel,” she says to the high official of Scotland Yard, who is naturally compelled to consult her, “the secret of our success has been the secrecy of our operations If the Prime Minister himself were to consult us about a stolen treaty or a murdered ambassador, he would learn no more of our methods than we have confided to you.” Now that it all right for Scotland Yard. Nobody objects to blundering policemen being kept in the dark. But the reader himself feels that he has a right to be let into the secret. And unfortunately Mr Oppenheim treats his readers as cavalierly as his characters. At the end of these stories we are no nearer knowing how the problems are solved than we were at the beginning. It is true that we are shown the lady’s methods of working. From time to time we see her vamping the criminal, and thereby extorting his guilty secret from him. Incidentally, one feels that this is extremely unprofessional. The great Sherlock, one feels sure, would never have made love to Dr. Moriarty. But what really exercises us is how the lady discovers the criminal’s identity in the first place. And that is what Mr Oppenheim resolutely refuses to tell us.

To do him justice, however, this is probably no mere capriciousness on Iris part. If he does not tell us the secret, no doubt it is because he doesn’t know it. Moreover, one feels that the beautiful baroness doesn’t know herself. If she has any guiding principle, it is simply to trust to luck. And it/ must be admitted that luck sei'ves her remarkably well. Whenever she travels by boat, criminals .in the next cabin audibly discuss their nefarious plans for her benefit. If she loiters by chance outside a house, the people inside perform all sorts of incriminating actions without bothering to pull down .the blinds In extreme cases, when she is really baffled, the criminal comes to her of his own accord and confesses everything If this is the best that Mr Oppenheim can do in the way of a detective story, pne wonders where he gets his reputation and his thousands of readers . But perhaps his admirers do not really want detective stories at all. Perhaps they are merely lusting for blood, and for the additional thrill of mixing together with a foreign noblewoman, in the most exclusive circles. Mr Oppenheim gives them full measure in this respect. His stories have their full quota of murders and sudden deaths, and his characters, if somewhat deficient in kind hearts, are plentifully supplied with coronets. To be quite fair, it should be admitted that Mr Oppenheim’s criminals are much more ingenious than his detective. Some of the plots unfolded in these stories are quite clever. And the manner of telling, though hogelessly trite, is not without its touches of humour. But the lover of detective stories would do better to reach down his Sherlock Holmes from the shelf. —D.H.M. ALMOST WITHOUT WORDS. But Full of Wood-Cuts. “A TRUE TALE OF LOVE IN TONGA.” By Robert Gibbing. ■(Faber and Faber.) Even in these days, when we believe in conciseness, brevity and punch, three hundred and thirty-three words seems hardly adequate for a book. Yet Mr Gibbing has used no more to unfold this charming little South Sea romance. The words indeed are merely

the setting in which he has enclosed his real gems. These are the twentythree woodcuts which fill the greater part of the book’s twenty-five pages. To the untutored eye of the reviewer, they appear good specimens of the engraver’s art. Pleasingly designed and extremely decorative, they are at the same time full of a quaint humour of their own. As illustrations, they are entirely admirable, richly filling in the bare outlines of the story. Mr Gibbing’s three hundred and thirtythree words are remarkably well chosen, and the total result is a quaint and beautiful book, of the sort that usually appears at Christmas time, but should be capable of giving delight for the rest of the year. —D.H.M. •

STRANGE AMERICAN NOVEL

Coincidence and Supernatural MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION, by Lloyd C. Douglas (Allen and Union). A very curious sort of book, and from some points of view very good. On the other hand, apart from certain American tricks of grammar and style, there is something about it which does not ring quite true!—perhaps a sentimentalism which the author visibly tries to exclude, perhaps the improbability of as much coincidence as occurs in the plot. A great brain surgeon is drowned, because at the crucial moment a wealthy young rip _ who has been knocked overboard is saved by the special respiratory apparatus which should have saved the Doctor. When the lad recovers, he finds everyone hostile to him because they feel that his worthless life was not a good enough exchange for the great doctor’s. Urged by the matron of the hospital in Detroit to try and follow in the footsteps of the great man, and atone in some way for what he has done, he enters the university and launches feverishly upon his studies, with superhuman energy. Meanwhile, there is another situation developing. The doctor has left a daughter, Joyce, who has been living a very gay life (previously aided and abetted by the rich young lad—Bobbie) and her stepmother, Helen, about the same age as Joyce, very beautiful and good. Bobbie meets the latter by chance, incognito, and they fall in love. Later, when she discovers his identity, she refuses to have anything to do with him, and holds him responsible for Joyce’s waywardness, while he is really trying to bring her back to the straight and narrow path. A third complication, and the keynote of the whole story, which seems to carry the personal conviction of the author, is the discovery by Bobbie of a little book, written in code by the g-reat doctor and telling the story of how he discovered the key to power and the building of personality from one passage of the Gospels, and the tremendous part it had played in his own life—the fact that when he gave alms or charity, the good he derived himself from that gift vanished when others knew of it. The young man is very sceptical at first and lets his work hang fire and cares not. Bobbie 1 suddenly has an amazing spiritual experience, and is urged to greater work. We next sea him attached to the same clinic as the doctor in whose footsteps he aspires to follow. He becomes a great brain surgeon, makes a name for himself by inventing an electric knife, and has to endure various reverses .with Helen. Joyce leaves her drunken husband, but v ßobbie patches it all up and she goes back to “keep him straight.” One of his other good deeds wa3 to find that Helen’s, cousin who was supposed to have been handling her investments had appropriated most of them. Bobbie puts enough of his own stock in her name, makes the miscreant write Helen a letter which just says he has re-invested in that stock, and sends him off to Rio de Janeiro —not before he has endeavoured to convert him. Helen finds out and is deeply wounded. The two are reconciled in the end in the most noble fashion— She is frightfully injured on the head in a motor accident in Rome. He is in Paris and goes post-haste over to operate and save her. Taken singly, each incident or line of plot has something to commend it, but, when they are all so unerringly matched together and so unusual, there are grounds for the accusation of improbability.—E.W.B.