The Mill Mystery. By Anna Katherine Green. (Roatledge and Sons.)—Investigators
of mysteries and solvers of enigmas may find ample scope for their ingenuity in searching out the causes of the Present deluge of cheap sensational fiction. A publisher has lately informed the world, through the columns of a contemporary, that not more than one novel in a dozen pays the coat of its production. As publishers are generally shrewd men of business, with a decided objection to losing money, we can only conclude that the profits on the one are more than enough to recoup the losses on the remainder. The hope of winning a single prize is set against the certainty of drawing many blanks. But surely publishers might be content with home productions, and refrain from glutting the English market with the horrors of American authors ! Miss Green (or is it Mrs. ?) whose "Leavenworth Case" has made her famous, is a sort of female Gaboriam Murder is the motif of her stories, and most of her char- acters are monsters of iniquity. Yet she writes with power, describes incident vividly, can contrive a complicated plot, and tell, with .great effect, a blood-curdling tale. Bat when this is said, all is said. Nothing can be more wildly improbable than her incidents, or leas true to Nature than her characters ; the gloom of her pages is un- relieved by a single flash of humour, and though the language in which she writes may be very good American, it is certainly very indifferent English. She affects a style which she probably considers picturesque, but which often borders on the grotesque. Her puppets are always doing the most wonderful things ; they "spring like panthers ;" their eyes "emit strange and fitful sparks," or "flashing wide open," give a glance "which cuts like a knife." Sometimes they burn like a thread of light, and one young woman has the strange habit of "hissing between her set teeth." But the heroine is so super. finely proper and morbidly delicate, that she objects to describe her- self as a woman, and speaks of "the instincts of her ladyhood." If Miss Green were under the painful necessity of quoting the passage, "Man that is born of woman," she would probably euphemise it into, "Gentleman that is born of lady." These, however, are peculiarities which devourers of horrors will doubtless be quite willing to overlook, provided they get their fill of mystery and sensation ; and of mystery and sensation The Mill Mysttry has more than enough to satisfy the most greedy appetite for literature of this class,—if literature it can be called.
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