Walpole Holiday*

ABOVE THE DARK TUMULT--Hugh Walpole--Donbleday, Doran ($2.50)./-

Hugh Walpole hopes "you will not take this Tale too seriously." Writing it was a holiday for him, reading it should be only a relaxation for you. In short, it is a murder story. And of course it has a happy ending.

Dick Gunn was down and out in post-War London, but he remembered better days. Before the War he had been land agent for a good friend in Devon. There he had known and liked quixotic, unbalanced John Osmund, and had fallen in love with Helen, Osmund's fiancee. Osmund and two cronies, attempting a Robin Hood burglary, had been arrested, jailed. Gunn was still in love with Helen but he had not seen her since. One cold night in Piccadilly, with only a half-crown between him and something desperate, he found them all again.

One Pengelly, evil from his mother's womb and now a professional blackmailer, had betrayed Osmund to the police, and Osmund and his pals knew it. After all these years Pengelly had invited his victims to a conference, hoping to use them in his business. Gunn turned up just in time to make one of the party, to witness the bloody finale, to discover that Helen was his at last.

The Author. Hugh Seymour Walpole, pleasantly unprofound novelist, is the son of an English bishop and feels that Life is earnest. Even in such a holiday tale as this he dutifully wrinkles his forehead, doubtfully wonders about such dark questions as the borderline of sanity, the worth of democracy, Good & Evil. Walpole devotees consider him a good if not a great novelist, a battler on the side of the angels; caustic critics call him pompous and sentimental. Walpole is supposed to be represented in Somerset Maugham's recent Cakes and Ale by "Alroy Kear." snobbish, successful but second-rate English man of letters.

/-Published March 27. *Published March 20.

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