OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
I wonder if I am alone in a feeling of impatience and bewilderment over what I may call half-fairy stories. Magic I understand and love; but this now diluted form of it leaves me cold. Take for example the book that has occasioned this complaint, The Curious Friends (ALLEN AND UNWIN), an unconventional and perhaps just a little silly tale about a secret association of children and grownups, pledged to mutual help and a variety of altruistic aims—a scheme, with all its faults, at least human and understandable. But Miss C.J. DELAGREVE has chosen to complicate it by (apparently) a dash of the supernatural, in the person of a character called Saint Ken, about whom we are told that he lived in a tunnel on the Underground and employed himself in helping distressed passengers. Well, what I in my brutal way want to know is whether this is a joke, or what. Because if I have to credit it, over goes the rest of the plot into frank make-believe. And fantasy of this kind consorts but ill with a scheme that embraces such realities as heart-failure and typhus. Not in any case that Miss DELAGEEVE'S plot could be called exactly convincing. "Preposterous" would be the apter word for this society of the Blue-Bean Wearers, in which vague elderly persons wandered about with sadly self-conscious children and talked like the dialogue in clever books. This at least was the impression conveyed to me. I may add that I was continually aware of a certainty that Miss DELAGREVE will do very much better when she selects a simpler and less affected subject.
In Douglas Jerrold (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) Mr. WALTER JERROLD has executed a pious task. He has written the life of his grandfather, and has done it with great enthusiasm. The work is in two volumes, one thick and the other thin, and sometimes I cannot help feeling that one volume, the thin one, would have been enough. DOUGLAS JERROLD'S reputation depends upon his work in Punch and his writing of plays, of which nearly seventy stand to his credit. To Punch he contributed from the second number and soon became a power by means of "Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures," "The Story of a Feather" and countless other articles which suited the taste of the public of that day. Of his work for Punch there is only the barest mention in this book, for that story has already been told at some length by the same author. In the present book Mr. WALTER JERROLD devotes a large amount of space to a review of DOUGLAS JERROLD'S theatrical pieces. Where now is a five-act comedy, entitled Bubbles of the Day, which at the time of its production was described as "one of the wittiest and best constructed comedies in the English language"? I am afraid that this comedy, and even Black-eyed Susan, JERROLD'S greatest triumph, have passed away into the limbo of forgotten plays and can never return to us. Another drama had in it as one of the characters "a certain cowardly English traveller named Luckless Tramp," a name, I should have thought, quite sufficient in itself to swamp every possible chance of success; yet our forefathers seem to have had no difficulty in accommodating themselves to it.
In an author's note to Moon of Israel (MURRAY) Sir H. RIDER HAGGARD tells us that his book "suggests that the real Pharaoh of the Exodus was not Meneptah or Merenptah, son of Rameses the Great, but the mysterious usurper, Amenmeses ..." I am not a student of Egyptology, and in this little matter of AMENMESES am perfectly content to trust myself to Sir RIDER, and, provided that he tells a good tale, to follow him wherever he chooses to lead the way. And this story, put into the mouth of Ana, the scribe, is packed with mystery and magic and miracles and murder. For fear, however, that this may sound a little too exhausting for your taste, let me add that the main theme is the love of the Crown Prince of Egypt for the Israelite, Lady Merapi, Moon of Israel. Sir RIDER'S hand has lost none of its cunning, and, though his dialogue occasionally provokes a smile when one feels that seriousness is demanded, he is here as successful as ever in creating or, at any rate, in reproducing atmosphere. I hope, when you read this tale of the Pharaohs, that you will not find that your memory of the Book of Exodus is as faded as I found mine to be.
Mr. CHRISTOPHER CULLEY, whom you may remember for a bustling, rather cinematic story called Naomi of the Mountains, has now followed this with another, considerably better. Lily of the Alley (CASSELL) is, in spite of a title of which I cannot too strongly disapprove, as successful a piece of work of its own kind as anyone need wish for, showing the author to have made a notable advance in his art. Again the setting is Wild West, on the Mexican border, the theme of the tale being the outrages inflicted upon American citizens by VILLA, and what seemed then the bewildering delay of Washington over the vindication of the flag. The "Alley" of its unfortunate name is the slum in Kansas City where Dave, stranded on his way westward, met the girl to whom the laws of fiction were inevitably to join him. I fancy that one of Mr. CULLEY'S difficulties may have lain in the fact that, when the tale, following Dave, had finally shaken itself from the dust of cities, the need for feminine society was conspicuously less urgent. Even after a rescued and refreshed Lily is brought up-country, she is kept, so to speak, as long as possible at the base, and only arrives on the actual scene of Dave's activities in time to be bustled hurriedly out of the way of the final (and wonderfully thrilling) chapters. The explanation is, I think, that the cowboy, whom he knows so well, is for Mr. CULLEY hero and heroine too. Dave, round whom the story revolves, is a pleasant study of a type of American youth which we are coming gratefully to estimate at its true worth; but in the development of the theme Dave soon becomes almost insignificant beside the greater figure of the cowboy, Monte Latarette. For him alone I should regard the book as one not to be missed by anyone who values a handling of character at once delicate and masterful.