Fiction
Swing, Brother, Swing. By Ngaio Marsh. (Collins. 9s. 6d.) I HAVE admired and enjoyed the work of Miss Ngaio Marsh for a long time now, but, owing to a distinction commonly made between novels and detective stories, this is the first chance I have had of expressing my. admiration publicly. Suppose we forget that Swing, Brother, Swing is a detective story, and consider it as a novel about a puzzling murder, with a solution to the puzzle as its climax ; do we find any limitation imposed by the theme ? Is the novel less good than a straight novel might have been which dealt with the same characteis, but was not concerned to solve a puzzle ? Ought Miss Marsh to set up in business as " a serious novelist " ?
My first answer must be that she is a serious novelist already. Her crime stories (of which this is a brilliant specimen) show more understanding of character and are better written than the great majority of straight novels. The danger of the crime story is that usually the plot comes first, and the characters have to fit in. A character has to be murdered in circumstances that throw suspicion on several others. What is more, motive and circumstance must be camouflaged so that the reader will not readily guess the answer ; but they must be plausible and inherent, so that he may not feel he has been cheated. Difficult indeed, under such a handicap, to reveal character freely and without distortion!
Yet in these conditions Miss Marsh writes one good novel of character after another. There are, I submit, two faintly doubtful points of characterisation in this gallery of beautifully observed and recorded personalities. The mystery concerns the death of an appalling accordion-player at a restaurant, in the course of an act put on to please an eccentric peer who fancies himself as a jazz drummer. Miss Marsh plays superbly fair, and hands us the clue on a plate—yet I failed egregiously to spot it. It is that, when th: pistol went o4; Rivera was playing his accordion. My two small queries are, first, would anyone so eccentric and volatile as the peer maintain a consistent cunning over a long period ? Second, doe' not a drug-addict cling at all costs to his source of supply ?
I dare say Miss Marsh has an answer to both questions, and, such is my devotion to her, I am ready to be convinced. They are posed less to the detective writer than to a serious novelist of generous sympathies and clear perceptions who has done as much as anyone to raise her chosen medium from a craft to an art.
Miss Stella Gibbons has brought it off again. Cold Comfort Farm reappears, minus most of its men, who have gone with the bull to South Africa. This time it is the venue of a conference, giving Miss Gibbons two sets of targets—Starkaddery in general, and the various preposterous highbrows who assemble in the redecorated farmstead. So intolerable are their antics that Flora, still addressed as " Robert Poste's child," sends cables to the emigrants. The replies vary in manner—" Whoam, whoam, like a wounded maggit. Love, Ezra," is a fair sample—but their effect is the same, and, by the final page, the old beloved uproar is in full swing again. and I was devouring this sublime essay in lunacy I kept guffawing and reading bits aloud to the family, who, in spite of the fact that they were doing a cross- word, laughed helplessly too. A book responsible for such an outrage on community life demands no further comment.
Mr. Wodehouse is equally destructive. " In this life it is not aunts that matter, but the courage which one brings to them." This, one of many great thoughts which it contains, might well be the motto of The Mating Season.
I have sat at the feet of Mr. P. G. Wodehouse ever since those early days in The Captain, when he wrote the best- series of school stories I have ever read. In his latest offering he has gone back boldly to the scene of former triumphs, with Beak Wooster as narrator and Jeeves in suave attendance. Also in the limelight is Gussie Fink-Nottle, who was, if I remember rightly, the subject of a very happy allusion in the Latin oration on the occasion when Oxford University so perceptively honoured his creator. The plot is a marvellous confusion of impersonations, mistaken identities, aunts, village concerts and so forth ; but the really astonishing points are the almost incredible verbal virtuosity, and the fact that The Mating Season is back in the top flight, one of the funniest in the long list. The pace is terrific, but, once again I must say it, the real astonishment is the vocabulary. How right Oxford was!
Sinister Street, after more than thirty years, confirms all I have ever felt about it. It is a classic ; and, excellent though the second part is, it does not touch the level of the first. The second part tells us what Oxford was like in the years just before the First World War. The first part tells us what boyhood was like always. Incidentally, to produce this large volume at such a price is a feat on which the publishers are to be congratulated. L. A. G. STRONG.
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