LAST year Katharine Brush, a young graduate of a newspaper, produced a novel, Young Man of Manhattan, which was as brisk and entertaining as one could ask. It followed that her next book would be sought for by the fiction magazines. Whether Red-Headed Woman (Farrar & Rinehart, $2.00) proved a successful serial I have no way of telling, but I don’t think it is so successful a book as her first. A Mid-Western chronicle of a beauty who could manage men and who had the ambition of a gold-digger, it is essentially a story for women. Men will be apt to find it monotonous.
The book is packed with close, feminine observation, and very feminine are its situations. We see ‘Red’ Andrews as other women saw her — mercilessly ; never once do we feel that charm with which she attracted men. If Red had more of Becky Sharp in her veins she would be better able to lead the story. As it is, she is bled so white by the author that our interest is transferred to the background, Renwood Falls, which is very faithfully described, and to Sally, the ‘second’ character, easily the most amusing person in the book. The closing chapters in New York seem badly manufactured.
If Miss Brush cuts her cloth for the ladies, I dare say W. R. Burnett suits the men. Mr. Burnett’s knowledge of the prize ring, racketeering, and the less-boosted Chicago realities, has already been ably expressed in fiction. Both his earlier novels, Little Camar and Iron Man, were book-club selections, and the former was translated into the films without loss of strength or excitement. Mr. Burnett knows the underworld and he writes it down to perfection.
In The Silver Eagle (Dial Press, $2.00), his new Chicago novel, he tries a more ambitious feat : he follows a self-made racketeer in his climb up through the restaurant and night-club game, up into Society — and into the web of Chicago’s most notorious citizen. Harworth, with his big shoulders, his love of money, and his silly monocle, is sometimes a little too theatrical, but in his affection for his manager, Stein (a fine figure!), and in his dealings with Molina (Capone?) we see him plain and alive. If is a good story, swift in action and weak only in this particular — society and gangsters don’t mix any better here than in actuality. When Mr. Burnett writes of hard guys, they are hard and no mistake; when he writes of artists or society folk, they are — well, stuffed shirts. A good director will correct that in the movies. Perhaps.
A. A. Milne joins the ranks of novelists without either hard girls or hard guys in his pages. It is true that he is the author of The Red House Mystery, one of the best and most entertaining of detective stories, and that he has written a prose version of his early play, Mr. Pim. But nevertheless, and strictly speaking. Two People (Dutton, $2.50) is his first novel. It is the story of a happy marriage. Because of Mr. Milne’s reputation, the publishers have prepared no blurb. Because of Winnie-the-Pooh, the book will carry to many a certain guarantee of pleasurable content. People who remember Dahlia, Archie, and Simpson in The Holiday Round will recognize the conversation of Two People. The wiseacres bitten by Dorothy Parker’s virus may perhaps recognize some irrepressible whims. Mr. Milne’s hero writes books and loves his wife. Mr. Dreiser would hate him, her, and them. But the reader, seeking diversion, may easily like it all.
