These stories are translated from the French by Alys Eyre Macklin. Henry B. Irving provides an introduction in which he says: “Reminding one of Edgar Allan Poe more than any other, M. Level employs the method of O. Henry in the service of the horrible.” The stories, which are all brief—have the titles: The debt collector; The kennel; Who? Illusion; In the light of the red lamp; A mistake; Extenuating circumstances; The confession; The test; Poussette; The father; For nothing; In the wheat; The beggar; Under chloroform; The man who lay asleep; Fascination; The bastard; That scoundrel Miron; The taint; The kiss; A maniac; The 10.50 express; Blue eyes; The empty house; The last kiss.
“He has Poe’s predilection for supernatural and gruesome themes, something of de Maupassant’s technique of compression, a flair for the ‘irony of fate’ formula, which was so characteristic of O. Henry’s plot, and a kinship with Burke’s nostalgie de la boue. But there the likeness ends, he has none of the qualities mentioned in a degree sufficient to raise him to the level of the men he suggests.”
+ − N Y Times p24 Ag 29 ’20 740w
“In spite of their subject-matter, the stories neither shock me morally, chill my blood with their horror, nor affect me with their pathos. A skillful machinist, not an artist, seems to have been at work.” E. L. Pearson
− + Review 3:249 S 22 ’20 480w
LEVERAGE, HENRY. Shepherd of the sea. il *$1.75 (2½c) Doubleday
20–26194
This is a story of the icy North, of ice-floes, of shipwreck, of starvation and mutiny at a whaling station, of an overland trip in a dog-sled, deprivation and hunger and narrow escape from freezing. A missionary sea-captain who is out to fight the whiskey traffic with the Eskimos and to carry the word of God to them, picks up Buck Traherne when his motor-boat had capsized in the Strait. Traherne is just out of college at Seattle and a tenderfoot. The life on ship-board puts strength into him and he becomes, with the shepherd, the mainstay of the castaway crew on Herschel Island. Moona—half Eskimo and half Scotch—the shepherd’s ward, loves him and after the rescue has come, and the arctic flowers have once more lifted their heads, the charm she has knitted into Traherne’s muffler shows its potency.