Fiction
8s. 6d.)
Smiley. By Moore Raymond. (Sylvan Press. 10s. 6d.)
MISS KYLIE TENNANT has rather a weakness for practical young women and shiftless middle-aged men. In Time Enough Later she once again tells, with racy humour and point, the adventures of such a female. Miss Tennant's young women are quite frankly adorable, and Bessie Drew is no exception to this rule ; indeed, I'm inclined to give her very high marks for sheer entertainment value. Child of a Sydney slum, she attaches herself with firm ferocity to a ne'er- do-well lodger of her mother's, who owes everyone money, including his landlady. But Bessie, who is gifted with a little imagination, sees in him a way to better things, in spite of the bitter opposition and contempt of her family, and clings on. Somehow the experience is not all that she hoped for, but on the credit side not nearly so bad as it might have been, for Bessie has that delightful self-reliance and warmth of character with which Miss Tennant so richly endows her heroines. The scene is Sydney. Maurice Wainright, the middle- aged philanderer, who takes himself so seriously as- an inventor of genius, is also an exceedingly accomplished photographer. And though he hates the commercial side of this particular line, he manages to persuade a rather shady business man to set him up in a studio. Bessie tags along as receptionist, charwoman and general handyman. Her family are outraged and indignant, but she defies them all. Eventually Maurice falls in love with her. There is a grandly comic party thrown at his studio, which Miss Tennant does superbly. Bessie is self-appointed chucker-out ; at the climax affairs get a little out of hand, however, so she deserts Maurice and goes off home for the night. But at the party she makes friends with an eccentric woman scientist, who has a shack in the country. Bessie and Wainright go down to this place for a week-end. They find the scientist away, and the place hardly conducive to illicit love. They become engaged, however, but it is the country with all its imple earthly joys which has taken real possession of the girl's heart. Quite a number of complications, including another devoted male, and the fact that she has got herself engaged to the fantastic Maurice, have to be sorted out before Bessie can give herself up to the fullest joys of the simple life. At times this lively narrative descends to the level of roaring farce ; but Bessie, in spite of dingy perils and desperate moments, keeps her common sense, high spirits and generosity, and stays a darling to the end.
Another novel with an Australian background is Smiley. This time the central figure is a small boy, ripe with almost every kind of juvenile zest, mischief and impudence. Mr. Raymond does not concern himself overmuch with other boyish characteristics. He provides a line on which to thread his hero's escapades by the simple expedient of a bicycle seen in a catalogue, on which Smiley
sets his heart. Starting from scratch, hindered rather more than helped by his mate Blue, the process of amassing funds is slow, sometimes dangerous and often painful. Just when the machine is within grasping distance, the youngster's entire capital is taken by his rascally father. However, the boy gets his bicycle in the end. Mr. Raymond's narrative contains many lively examp:es of Austra- lian slang and back-chat.
Mr. James Allen in We Always Come Back details excit:ngly the flight of an American bomber and her crew from this country to Hamburg and back, during the period of the heavy softening raids. His technique is neat and skilful, for while he sets off at a gcod pace, he quickly suggests and maintains the factors of danger and suspense such as a narrative of this kind demands. It is the Boomerang's twenty-fifth trip ; interlarded with the chronicle of her perilous journey, the exploits of her company, mostly amorous, are related. Mr. Allen deals with the superficialities of his characters on the whole, and while he does explore more deeply the potenti- alities of his narrator, the navigator Ronny, the result is not very satisfying or convincing. One could wish that the author had con- centrated less on dance-halls, public-houses and light young women ; for the high spirits and practical jokes of his gallant young band fail to convey the very real and desperate problems of living and warring from a country not one's own.
Miss Margot Bennett contrives an exceedingly ingenious crime in her lively first novel, Time to Change Hats. Her detective, a young man fresh from the Army, determines on a career of crime investigation. His friends are not very helpful or encouraging, except for one young woman who is living with her infant son at a safe distance from London on account of the blitzes. She has received a visiting-card signed "Death." Rushing down to the village, which is decorated with a lively variety of evacuees, the crime investigator has hardly time to settle down before one of them, a mysterious woman from Australia, is found murdered in the house of a neighbour, an elderly eccentric and wealthy bachelor, who, only a few minutes earlier that same evening had been ambushed and wounded by an unseen enemy. Miss Bennett has a pleasantly dry sense of the comic which makes her crime story unusually
Previous page
