In the Fog. By Richard Harding Davis. (Heinemann and Co.
2s. 6d.)—The fog is a mere device used by Mr. Harding Davis to string a number of detective stories together. It is clear, too, from the beginning that the stories will eventually prove to be the invention of their various narrators. This to the present writer completely destroys the illusion of a detective story. To be taken seriously, the author must pretend to have obtained his plots at great peril to life and limb, by associating with criminals, or by making friends with detectives. For the characters created by the author actually to confess that they themselves invented the stories is to make the adventures flat, uninteresting, and unconvincing. The complications are sufficiently ingenious, however, for us to ask Mr. Davis to invent a better framework, and to give us a few more specimens of the ingenious literary chess-playing of this type of plot.
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