"Tnurerx Mex."—By Tiffany Thayer.
Mlustrated by Mahlon Blaine.
Claude Kendall, New York.
This book has already _received the tribute of six different printings since its-first publication in May! last. It would be fatuous, the fore, to pretend that it has' not tracted notice. Mr. Thayer is determined to avoid the conventions.
He would shudder at any suggestion that he was in the slightest degree mealy-mouthed, and these intentions brightly through the pages of his book. He creates a fantastic series of murders on 2 wholesale scale, all perpetrated by one man, uns the man to earth, and then produces the jury destined to try him The lives of the jurors constitute the main theme of the book. The idea is to show how it was these! twelve men could be induced to be enient in regard to a particularly revolting murderer. Whether the idea is worth retaining when it has' been expounded, even though in such' brilliant vein as that of Mr. Thay ex, will be a matter of opinion. The delight of reading his fine, nervous prose is apt at first to give the reader a false notion of the real] merit of his achievement. The dramas presented are marked by' clever characterization and a shrewd grasp of modern social conditions, Nor is Mr. Thayer _deficient in his exposition of the eternal duel between the sexes. The only question is whether he need so ostentatiously have discarded re-licence. Let it not be assumed that he is coarse in his language. A more ingenious wielder of "periphrases in describing essentially obscene episodes could not be imagined. But the question remains, when ther it was worth doing at all. And after reading through 823 "pages of this book the answer seems to be in the negative—E.m.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.