Down East

THE OWNLEY INN--Joseph C. Lincoln & Freeman Lincoln--Coward-McCann ($2.50).

If a hurricane blew everybody off Cape Cod, it could be repopulated overnight by the fictional offspring of Joseph Crosby Lincoln. Last week Author Lincoln, collaborating with his nonfictional offspring Freeman, proved that not even a hurricane can stop him from writing about Cape Cod, used the big blow of 1938 merely as curtain raiser for The Ownley Inn. Before the final curtain, when the stolen New England Primer (value: $60,000) is recovered, and broken-nosed Puss Clarke makes up with his ex-fiancee, a full cast of summer folk and Down East worthies have sauntered across the stage.

Red-cheeked, rotund Joseph C. Lincoln's 30-odd novels all have their quotas of clambakes, oilskins and "characters." "The average summer boarder," says dry-spoken Innkeeper Seth Hammond Ownley, "is forever hunting 'characters' and forgetting to look in the looking glass for a specimen." Novelist Lincoln, now 69, comes of a seafaring Cape family, was once a commercial artist. To make his drawings sell better, he wrote verses and jokes to go with them. Soon the verses outsold the pictures. Cap'n Eri, his first novel, was a bestseller in 1904; he has been publishing bestsellers ever since.

Author Lincoln lives in suburban Villanobly went off to London; one of his daughters drifted into marriage with the handsome, idle son of retired cotton magnate Sir James Ashwell. The Major himself, seeking a good housekeeper, married a large-boned, clumsy spinster of 37 who dismayed him by producing twins. Author Whipple's eventual solution, after using the Munich crisis in a genteelly British way to resolve her novel's problems, combines the Major's estate, Sir James's money and the assorted talents of all the characters, turns Saunby Priory into an up-to-date version of its original function.

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