Into the Void: A Bookshop Mystery

by Florence Converse.Boston: Little, Brown and Co. 1926. 12mo. viii+230 pp. $2.00. An Atlantic Monthly Press Publication.

THIS diverting mystery tale is a thing to pounce on for sheer gayety and mirth. Detective skit, college yarn, and knowing hint of satire all in one, it opens demurely on a community bookshop, a cat named Bibelot, and a Poet who apologizes for quaint demeanor with the wistful explanation, ‘I was tired. I’m always tired after I read my verses. It — it discourages me.’

The wit in these pages is crisp and ‘ instructed ’; the humor is the glancing humor of a sprite. Ingredients of mystery include white china milk bottles, a brown suede slipper, the Fourth Dimension, — which, says Mrs. Penfield, is ‘ something to do with plumbing, Willie,’ — and a Pierce-Arrow with fender bent beyond compare. The stage is the edge of a campus full of college girls and visiting young men, when traffic is whirling past to Boston, on ‘ the night before the Game.’ The Poet’s final selection has highly edified his audience, and the girls rush home through the traffic declaiming snatches of vers libre:—

shouted the young women, dragging their escorts across the turnpike through the starry welter of automobiles at the risk of their lives.

Naturally, when the Poet and Miss Patty, charming Manager of the Bookshop, seem also to have pranced into the Fourth Dimension, the community is agog.

Rapid conversation, most tricky and expeditious of speed wagons, whisks the narrative along, with never a puncture all the way, from the corner of Emerson Road and Audubon, to Prytania Street in New Orleans. From the title, one suspects an exasperating solution not of this world; halfway through, one thinks that he ‘knows all.’ Both dangers are adroitly sidestepped, with what Mr. Strachey would call a most ‘exhilarating pas de chat.' Bibelot himself could not have gone about it with a lighter foot; not even Bibelot, ‘the cat who knows and won’t tell.’

Miss Converse is equipped to turn off a college story, for the book jacket says she lives in —• well, it tells you where, both on the jacket and in Who’s Who. The college may be an understudy of her own, but it has echoes in it from Every Campus, with its students inciting themselves to be ‘sane,’ and promising their spicy President that they won’t forget, ‘the academic’ while ‘signing up’ for pursuits elsewhere. Campus foibles are hit off with accurate aim. The brown suede slipper on the highway, for instance, is exactly like the ones that the Head of Student Government is wearing at the moment. She disclaims the extra pump.

‘Perhaps,’ suggests the minister, ‘it’s your roommate’s. ’

‘No; these I have on are my roommate’s,’ says the Head of Student Government.

Throughout, it is a merry tale, differing from the heavy run of howling mysteries in its originality of theme. Even the proposal is original — think of that. And as to probability, have we not the word of Andrew Murphy, hard-bitten traffic policeman on the pike to Boston, who ought to know?

‘It’s my experience,’ observes Officer Murphy grimly, ‘it’s my experience that anything might happen the night before the Game. ’

FRANCES LESTER WARNER