CURRENT LITERATURE.
In spite of the disappearance and death of Sherlock Holmes, the Strand Magazine still maintains its character for brightness, variety, and" up-to-dateness." The sense onalism of detectivism, or at all events of something like it, is kept up by a series styled "Stories from the Diary of a Doctor." "The Silent Tongue," in the March number, for example, contains a homicide which looks very like a murder, and is, of course, put down to the wrong man. As a story of treasure-hunting in India which, though not unex- citing, is dashed with comedy rather than with tragedy, "The Treasure of the Ram-Bagh " is well worth reading. There is an abundance of literature of the interview and " graphic " order. Thus M. Got, the veteran French actor, has ample justice done him ; and so has Cheltenham College, in a series entitled, "Girls' Schools of To-Day." Of a different kind, though equally inform- ing, are "How Explosives are Made," and " Journeyings of the Judges." Of the minor stories, "The Secret of Julius Hatton" and "The Dead Revel "—in the latter of which Mrs. St. Los Strachey shows herself to possess an eerie power that recalls the late Sheridan Le Fanu—are the best. The only thing that appears at all strained in the Strand Magazine is the writing which is ostentatiously and professionally humorous.
Previous page
