I was inclined to flatter myself that nothing in the plot of The Silver Tea-shop (Stanley Paul) could possibly take me by surprise, but I found towards the end that Miss E. Everett Green had contrived to slip in the real villain all unsuspected while I, as she meant me to, was staring hard at the supposed one, so that there I must acknowledge myself defeated. With a stolen invention, an old gentleman found shot in his room, and a son under a vow to avenge his father, the story provides plenty of thrills, and the "Silver Tea-shop" itself has the fascination that business ventures in books often exercise. It seems to be run on such lavish lines for the prices charged that I found myself looking hungrily for its address. I wish the author had not referred to her hero as having "mobile digits" and burdened her ingenuous story with anything so important as a prologue. By making the villain's deserted offspring not one baby girl only, or even twins, but triplets, Miss Everett Green provides waitresses all of one family for the "Silver Tea-shop," and that, though a happy arrangement, is a little too uncommon to add to the likelihood of an unconvincing tale.
When a book is succinctly labelled Love Stories (Doran), at least no one has any right to complain that he wasn't warned beforehand of the character of its contents. As a matter of fact, human nature being what it is, I have little doubt that Mrs. Mary Roberts Rinehart has hit upon a distinctly profitable title. Indeed I believe that this has already been proved in the Land of Freedom, from which the work comes to us, where (I am given to understand) the vogue of sentimental fiction is even greater than with ourselves. What the name does nothing to indicate is that the stories are almost all of them laid in or about hospital wards. For some, perhaps most, of the author's admirers this may serve only to increase the charm; for others, who prefer their romance unflavoured with iodoform, not. Undeniable that she has a smiling way with her, and a gift of sympathetic enjoyment that carries off the old, old dialogues, even imparting freshness to the tale of the patient in extremis who persuades his attractive nurse into a death-bed marriage, treatment that the slightest experience of fiction should have warned her to be invariably curative. Perhaps the best of the tales is "Jane," which tells very amusingly the results of a hospital strike that in actual life would, I imagine, have provided little humorous relief. By this time you may have gathered that what matters about Mrs. Rinehart is not what she says but the way that she says it; upon which hint you can act as fancy dictates.
I very distinctly feel that "Katharine Tynan" could have made a first-rate novel of Denys the Dreamer (Collins) and have had plenty over for a good second if she had taken the trouble. But her fluent pen runs away with her down paths that lead nowhere in particular, instead of developing her main characters and situations to an intelligible and satisfactory point. Denys is of a gentle Irish family that has come down to very small farming. He dreams good, solid and rather Anglo-Saxon dreams of draining bogs on the sea-coast estates of Lord Leenane, whose agent he becomes (and whose daughter he loves from afar), and of a great port that is to rival Belfast. Unexpected, not to say incredible, assistance comes from a Jew money-lender and his wife. The portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Aarons are the best things in the book, and I hope Mrs. Hinkson will make a novel about these two admirable people some day soon. Denys makes his own and his patron's fortune and I am sure lives happily ever after with Dawn, who is the palest wraith of a girl, owing to the shameful neglect of her author, who is too busy putting large sums of money into the pockets of the principal puppets. Indeed, for a West Coast of Ireland story a demoralising amount of money is going about.
The principal scenes of The North Door (Constable) are laid in the Cornwall of some hundred-and-thirty years ago, and I welcome Dr. Greville Macdonald as an expert in the Cornish language and character. Cornwall, as all readers of fiction know, has during the last few years been attacked again and again by novelists, and most of them would do well to study Dr. Macdonald's romance and most thoroughly to digest it. In form, however, he will have little to teach them, for his book is very indifferently constructed. It may seem ungrateful in these rather skimpy days to complain of a surfeit of matter, but there is stuff in this book for two if not three novels. One cannot blame Dr. Macdonald for his indignation at the miseries of child-labour, but here it is perhaps out of place. His Mr. Trevenna, the mystical parson, friend of smugglers and of everyone who suffered from laws (unrighteous or righteous), is a great figure; and I shall not soon forget either his correspondence with Lady Evangeline Walrond or his superhuman kindliness of heart. If you want to get at the true flavour of Cornwall you have only to open The North Door.
A young clerk in an insurance office, who wanted to go as a missionary to India, is the hero, if there is one, of Mrs. Alice Perrin's latest novel, The Vow of Silence (Cassell). I have never read a book about India which made such an ambition seem more courageous, for it gives such a hot and thirsty picture of that country when Harold Williams at last reaches it that it is positively uncomfortable to read it in Summer weather. Harold and his brother and sister missionaries live in a state of stuffy discomfort which soon undermines his health and leaves him no defence against the charms of Elaine Taverner, who has a large cool drawing-room and dainty frocks, and a young soldier lover and an old scholar husband, and all the other things we expect of pretty young women in Anglo-Indian novels. Poor Harold, consumed at once by a zeal which makes him long to save Elaine's soul and a passion which makes him embrace a parcel of her lingerie, very naturally loses the remains of his reason and paves the way for her marriage with her lover by obligingly pushing the elderly husband into the jaws of a crocodile. If it were more convincing it would be a painful story—in some hands it might have been a great one; as it is, Mrs. Perrin seems for once to have missed her opportunity.