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Novels and Novelists

Mystery and Adventure

Mystery and Adventure

The Death of Maurice — By Barry Pain
The Ancient Allan — By H. Rider Haggard

In the publishers' announcement which accompanies ‘The Death of Maurice’ there is a suggestion that the reader may well be surprised to find that a humorist is capable of writing a really well-designed and cleverly worked-out mystery novel. But we should have thought that humorous writing depended almost entirely for its success upon the author's sense of design, and his ability to give it adequate expression. He, of all writers, cannot afford to leave anything en l'air, anything to the imagination, for it is not to the imagination that he makes his appeal, but to the reader's sense of fancy and delight in invention. With all due respect we might liken him in the world of letters to the music-hall artist in the theatrical world, whose performances appear to be spontaneous, accidental almost, whereas there is not an action, movement, glance which is unrelated to the expert whole.

‘The Death of Maurice’ is a very good example of the high level of Mr. Barry Pain's technical accomplishment. From the opening chapter it might almost be said to ‘play itself,’ so easy and sure is the author's touch, and yet he has page 160 guarded against monotony by giving us a great deal more of real characterization than is usual in such stories. Who killed Maurice Carteret is never a tragic question; it is not even a startling one. A moment or two after his death, his friend, while he waited for the man-servant to fetch the police, heard, beyond the garden, someone playing the flute—a fragment of ‘Solveig's Song.’ It was a still, clear night. Maurice lay dead on the garden path, and then there came the sound of the flute. Who killed Maurice Carteret? Who could it be playing the flute? It is not that these questions seem to fall hard on one another in the mind of the reader; but they seem to be of precisely equal importance and interest. They suggest that there is, in either case, a little problem to be solved, and, if you are sufficiently interested in human nature to care to study the widely different reactions of a certain circle of people to either of these questions … ‘come with me, dear reader,’ says Mr. Barry Pain.

Thus, very cleverly, the author keeps us in two minds. While we accompany him on his search he presents each character in so intriguing a way that we forget what we are after until, the moment our curiosity is fully aroused, we are made aware that, after all, our real business is to find the murderer. Is the murderer ever really found? And who was it, finally, who played the flute? Some readers will find a perfectly satisfactory answer to both these questions, but others will be left wondering.

‘The Ancient Allan,’ Sir Rider Haggard's new novel, is a far simpler variety of the pastime novel. It opens on a familiar note:

Now, I, Allan Quatermain, come to the weirdest (with one or two exceptions perhaps) of all the experiences which it has amused me to employ my idle hours in recording here in a strange land, for after all England is strange to me.

This is the kind of thing to settle down to when the destination is Devonshire, if it is not Cornwall; but, alas! page 161 it needs—it dreadfully needs—the flying interruptions outside the carriage window—the mysterious interruptions of people's sandwiches—the indignant emotion aroused by the tea-basket, and the blissful sight of the train making a great scallop round the blue edge of the sea—to enable us to swallow such a very dusty dose of ancient Egypt.

Here is battle, murder and sudden death, wheels within chariot wheels, villains and heroes and black slaves, who in their land were kings; here is the mighty battle with the crocodile, the torture of the boat—all the ingredients that once upon a time, only to get a whiff of, knew us hungry. But nowadays, to read of how one was placed in an open boat and another boat put on top, so that only the head and hands remained outside—to be launched on a river and allowed to linger—awakes no response in us at all.

(February 27, 1920.)