Professor Kamban is a master of the dramatic and throughout the whole of this interesting book he manages to maintain that heavy, tragic atmosphere in which the Norsemen seem to have lived their lives. The general plot works slowly towards one of the bitterest climaxes which could be conceived, and the manner in which Frey took her revenge for what had been done to her is the culminating incident in a long and dramatic story. The action- throughout the book is not particularly rapid, but the general atmosphere it creates brings the tenth century very near to the resent day and makes the old bones of history live again.—R.T.P-0.
New Fiction "White Girls Eastward" (Hutchinson, London, 7/6), Mr. TAurlow Craig's latest novel, is a splendid thriller that absolutely must be read at one sitting! As the title so obviously indicates, this yarn is one that is bound up in all the vice and degradation of white slave trafficking, but the author, with all the approved subtleties of the experienced writer at his command, has skilfully offset all sordidness by introducing an intriguing love affair between the foster-daughter of an arch-fiend and Bunjy Hearne, wealthy man-about-town and crack detective, who is finally responsible for breaking up the nefarious gang that dopes, buys and sells young and attractive women just as if they were mere cattle. The action is fast and furious throughout, for with the mysterious disappearance of a charming and well-known si ciety girl and the subsequent suicide of her father, a band of interested amateur sleuths get busy in tracking down the traffickers and the reader is quickly taken from the cheap splendour of Maida Vale to a tenth-rate bar on the Antwerp waterfront where a cargo steamer is waiting to transport its delectable, albeit unwilling, load somewhere East of Suez.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.