Jottings

Radio Record, Volume V, Issue 10, 18 September 1931, Unnumbered Page

Jottings

‘ANOTHER thriller, and an excellent one, is "The Crime Without «4 Flaw." Several, people may legitimately be suspected. of killing Mrs. Britan down in the West, yet they all seem able to provide the two delightful sleuths from Scotland Yard. with an eutirely satisfactory alibi. Inspector Brock, however, is something of a psychologist, and capable of wearing down his quarry. Mr. Leslie Depard has been most successful in his latest essay in fiction, and we hope to see more of his very engaging detectives.

R. YEATS-BROWN; who made @ name. for himself with "Bengal Lancer," has written a "true story," provisionally called ‘Hveline." It deals with the maze of plot and counterplot in Constantinople during the fateful years 1910-1920. 7 * * 8 To be successful to-day as a humorist, it would seem, you must lay about you with a pretty heavy blud‘geon, In."By the Way," you have Mr, J. B. Morton in his role as "Beachcomber," reprinting..a ‘year’s drolleries, and whether he is playing satirist, -- parodist, or maddest of hatters, he is "gittacking the shams and hypocrisjes "of présent-day civilisation, There are those who find this author tiresome, ‘but there are others to whom he is a ‘joy, who love to read of the doings of Lady Cabstanleigh and Mr. Roland Milk. A delightful volume to pick up occasionally from that bedside table Avhere are collected all sorts and conditions of literature. — = i s * RATHER unexpected to find Miss G. ~~ &B. Stern writing a thriller, but she las done so, and quite an entertaining one too, Mrs, Framlingham hag a party on the Riviera, and so has Lady Hunper. And Mr, Fred Poole, a comedian, "iy found dead one night in the former ludy’s villa, Was he murdered, and, if so, Was that nice young al the villain? That.is the problem, and it is ‘set. out with "considerable verbal dex"terity, For those who adore «1 mystery, "combined with agreeable -chatter of social doings, "The Shortest Night" will be most welcome. — ™ Om * N "The English: Are They Human?’, the author, Mr. G. J. Renier (by birth a Dutchman), narrates that he.found the learning of our language "excruciatingly difficult,’ and that he looks upon us asa very peculiar sort of people. When he came to England, he says, he was conyinced that nations differed from one another only on points of subsidiary importance, Noon he abandoned that theory, howeyer, and has remained to this day an outsider and an alien. "The foreigner," he says, "only sees the perennial puzzle of an Englishman’s face that guards the secret of his soul like a sphinx before a temple when mysterious rites are celebrated, And London itself presents the same immovable appearance; it is as inserutable as it is immeasurable." As he learnt to know the English better his liking for them increased, but quite definitely. came to the unshakable conclusion "that, the world is inhabited by two species of human beings, mankind and the Hyslish !"