Baroness Von Hutten’s poor little “Pam,” Dodd, Mead & Co., with her contradicting intensity and innocence, and her distorted notions of matters social, is as interesting a study as can be found in recent fiction. It might be as well not to leave her in the path of conventionally-brought-up young persons who have not her antecedents—but their elders will understand her as a product, and perhaps even perceive that she points a moral while adorning a tale. Pam is the child of a mercenary English girl, well born, who has fled to the Continent with her lover, an opera singer, who has left his wife. Contrary to the usual result of such unions, the two are completely happy in one another; too much so to bestow any special attention on Pam, except the explanation to her, in most explicit terms, of her social limitations as their offspring. Her wanderings from one situation to another with a maid and a monkey, her shrewd childish distrust of the conventional virtues, her slow awakening to the absorbing passion for the man she loves, and her final realization of the barriers which stand between them, make a strong story, absorbing in its interest.
Two more detective stories are “The Amethyst Box” and “The Ruby and the Caldron,” by Anna Katharine Green, the latter published in the same volume with another short story, “The House in the Mist,” by the same author.
The two volumes are the first of a series which the publishers—Bobbs-Merrill Company—call “The Pocket Books,” designed to represent “the three aspects of American romance—adventure, mystery and humor.”
They are happily named, for they are small volumes, which can be conveniently slipped into the pocket and read at odd times.
“The Amethyst Box” and “The House in the Mist” are tales of mystery of rather a grim sort, for there are violent deaths in both, but, as in all of Mrs. Rohlfs’ stories, justice is finally executed upon the guilty, and the reader’s sense of the fitness of things is satisfied.
The only unpleasant feature of “The Caldron and the Ruby” is that suspicion of theft is directed toward an innocent person; but inasmuch as, in order to make a detective story, the innocent must be under suspicion and must be ultimately vindicated, this cannot be considered in the light of a defect.
Of quite a different character is the tale of Morley Roberts’ “Lady Penelope,” L. C. Page & Co. The reader spends most of his time, as it were, in the wake of a gaseous motor car. Such audacious defiance of the conventionalities on the part of the heroine, such mystery and scandal as to her matrimonial ventures, such “racing and chasing” and automobiling, such varying suitors—all individually represented by full-page illustrations—such a precociously impudent boy of fourteen meddling with the plot and acting as Penelope’s prime minister, such mixed-up situations and harum-scarum talk, cannot be found between ordinary lovers, but the result is amusing, to say nothing more. The best character in the book is the old duchess, for whose mystification Penelope’s scheme is planned, and who only at the climax discovers, like the rest of us, which of six men her niece has married, though all of them lay claim to that honor.