UNQUENCHABLE FIRE. By Joan Sutherland. (Cassell. 7s. 6d. net.)—One has
only to grant a haggard, handsome actor nursing an appalling secret, and a brave, handsome actress of most womanly parts, and set their course in motion against a background of the modern theatres and film studios of New York, to create a story to attract those who seek pastime rather than literature. Miss Sutherland does her uninspired task well. Her Thespian hero is courageous— almost too courageous, since he goes to the outmoded lengths of saving a drowning skater and of nursing a smallpox patient as well. This no doubt is to offset the crime he bears on his conscience.
Not for ever must the marriage between him and the heroine be left unfulfilled. And so he babbles in his delirium when she is nursing him : by the end of the book his lips are on hers. This novel will doubtless propagate one of those films which makes kinema audiences at once so numerous and so mentally starved.
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