Books Reviewed

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 677, 31 May 1929, Page 16

Books Reviewed

AN ACTRESS’S MEMOIRS As a daughter of Mr. G. A. Storey, R.A., Miss Gladys Storey —whose volume of memoirs issued by the House of Methuen has just come to hand — had many opportunities of meeting her father’s famous contemporaries. She had the profitable hobby, as a child, of inveigling the truly great into drawing autographed sketches for her, and many of these quaint conceits are now used to illustrate anecdotes dealing with the art world of the Victorian era. Here are sketches by Kate Greenaway, Phil May, Harry Furniss and Edwin Abbey mixed with tales of Thackeray and Dickens and Dickens’s daughter, Mrs. Kate Perugini (to whom the book was dedicated). But Miss Storey’s opportunity of meeting “All Sorts of People” was not confined solely to this period. She became entitled to meet famous people “in her own right” after she had embraced a theatrical career, and she has a host of tales to tell of actors, authors, musicians and, of course, painters, which carry us through the Edwardian period to the Neo-Georgian. The illustrations accompanying the memoirs of this later period are particularly interesting, and include a fine sketch, “A Tramp on the Four Roads of Ireland,” by Sir William Orpen and a pen and ink drawing, “The Three Diggers,” by Sir George Clausen. Even that wary bird, Mr. Augustus John, insisted upon being hung in Miss Storey’s gallery. "All Sorts of People.” Methuen and Co., Ltd., London. Our copy from the publishers. A Rhyming Murder Sequence Here is a pretty problem for amateur detectives. A man named Cochrane Robin is assumed to have been killed by a friend bearing a name which is the German equivalent of Sparrow, and the death is presumably caused by a shot from a bow. Would anyone suggest that the famous “Death of Cock Robin” was being re-enacted? He might possibly do so when he learnt of a second murder in which a Mr. John E. Sprigg ■was shot through the top of the head . . . that is, if he remembered the nursery rhyme about the little man who had a little gun and who “shot Johnny Sprig through the middle of his wig.” Confusion would be intense if the next murder was of a hunchback who was pushed from a wall in an unmistakably HumptyDumptyish way, and still another killing was based on "The House That Jack Built.” Such a series of “Mother Goose” mysteries gave that eminent criminologist Mr. Philo Vance food for furious thought. But one may always rest assured that Mr. Vance will take the right course. Suffice it to say that here is a book that may be described as “This Week’s Gooseflesh Special.” As each new crime is re*

I vealed and the import of the sinister j rhs-ming sequence dawns on the I reader the hair on his head assumes, automatically, a wind-swept appearance. Mr. Vance’s chase to save Little Miss Muffst—we had forgotten to mention that one—is alone w r orth the money. And we are offering a reward of two aspirins to the man who can discover “who done it” before page 330. “The Bishop Murder Case.” By S. S. Van Dine. Cassell and Co., Ltd., London. Our copy through Arthur J. Harding. Ltd., 220 Queen St., Auckland. At Toad Hall Gilding the lily is generally regarded as a work of supererogation. Mr. A. A. Milne has tried it in making a play from Kenneth Grahame’s nursery classic, “The Wind in the Willows.” The play bears the title “Toad of Toad Hall,” and although Mr. Grahame’s fascinating and chatty animal friends Toad, Mole, Rat and Badger occupy the stage, one feels i sure that Eeyore, Pooh, Tigger arid the rest of Mr. Milne’s pals are waiting in the wings to bounce into the action. A delightful little play this, worthy to rank in children’s literature with the Alice books and the tales of dear old Uncle Remus. “Toad of Toad Hall.” Methuen and Co., Ltd., London. Our copy from the publishers. Footprints An open window, a rope leading through it from the foot of a murdered man’s bed on to the snowcovered roof outside, the sound of a shot through the night. Complete i absence of a crime motive, bloodstains and footprints in the snow. Here is a startling enough combination of circumstances for a crime analyst to try her wits upon. The murdered man was Richard Quilter, descendant of “ten generations of clean-minded, able-bodied men and women,” and the scene is Q2, the Quilter ranch. Tradition and family loyalty are almost an obsession with the Quilters, and this, coupled with the fact that seven of them found themselves locked in their rooms on the night of the tragedy, further complicates the tangle of theories as to who the murderer was. No outsider was in the house when the act occurred, there were no footprints of any stranger outside, the place was searched from coal-bin to linen-cup-boards; yet, though it seems the logical explanation, the author convinces the reader that it is obviously impossible, iu view of the strong blood-tie existing between them, that any Quilter should have murdered another in cold blood for no apparent reason. How the enigma is unravelled by Lynn MacDonald, crime analyst, through a series of letters written by the 12-year-old Lucy Quilter to her brother Neal at the time, makes worthwhile reading, and the denouement gives the reader as much of a shock as it gave the Quilters. The book, with its punctilious choice of words, is extremely well written for a yarn of this type. Characterisatiou is also unusually good, and the psychological action on which the story, by its nature, has to depend is faithfully carried out. “Footprints,” by Kay Cleaver Strahan. Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 14 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London. Our copy from the publishers. PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED I “Evolution”— “ls It Scientific? Shall We Teach It In Our Schools?” By William H. Pettit, M. 8., Ch.B. 28 pp. Scott and Scott, Auckland. Our copy from the New Zealand Bible Training Institute, Upper Queen Street.