The Undiscoverables and Other Stories

THERE are three tales in this book. The first two are typical Ralph Bates — distinguished if obscure interpretations of the modern revolutionary temper. The third is high-grade mystery-adventure story.

In When the Man Comes, Follow Him, the longest and best story in the book, Mr. Bates reveals unsuspected talents. Horror, greed, courage, superstition, and treachery are presented vividly in a series of alternating moods, dominated by the supermood of imminent, inevitable disaster.

The Undiscoverables is an impressionistic tale depicting the mood of the simple Italian fisherfolk a week after Italy’s entry into the war. The motto — ‘The hand that held the dagger has stabbed it into the back of his own people ‘ — tells us a great deal, if not everything. The Burning Corn describes an armed encounter between the revolutionary mountain folk and the reactionaries in Mexico in 1938.

There are real literary gifts in Mr. Bates, not fully realized, however, because he refuses to recognize that the function of a storyteller is to tell a story and not beat about the bush.

J. C.