STIFFS. By Melbourne Garahan. (Leonard Parsons. 7s. 6d. net.) Mr.
Garahan chooses to confine the title of " stiff " to the upper strata of tramp society : this is not quite correct, for there are plenty of stiffs outside the doss-house—plenty, even, in the class Mr. Garahan condemns so scornfully under the name of " men about town." He shows an evidently genuine acquaintance with his material, but he nevertheless produces a surprisingly inaccurate effect, supplementing his personal experience with a good deal of unjustifiable generaliza- tion. This is especially noticeable in his use of cant terms, which have not anything like such definite meanings as he attaches to them. And the examples of nautical swearing he introduces with some éclat wouldn't raise a titter in a girls' school. On the other hand, he is perfectly right in insisting on many of the tramp's good qualities—especially his trust- worthiness to a pal in money matters, as the present writer has proved to his satisfaction with such unlikely material as an Americanized Montenegrin dope-trafficker, with whom he was once stranded for some time in the slums of an Adriatic port. But many of the other- virtues he claims for him—such as ,chastity—are simply the .fruit of a romantic imagination. Most of Mr. Garahan's moralizing is intolerable ; and his condemnation of all other sorts of down-and-out except his beloved stiff is narrow-minded in the extreme, for the under- world is not entirely peopled by characters out of 0. Henry, but is an organism of a diversity of which Mr. Garahan seems 'hardly to have an inkling ; nor has he any right to dub it glibly (as he does) a general mass of corruption. On the other hand, judged by magazine standards, he has a good deal of technical accomplislunent : when not moralizing, he writes amusingly : this makes quite a pleasant railway-journey or influenza book. The plot is unoriginal ; but then, there is little harm in that, and it moves well.
(Continued on page 564.)
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