For Reading Aloud

SAM SMALL FLIES AGAIN-Eric Knight -Harper ($2.50).

The stories in this unpretentious book have that rare quality of truly democratic fiction: like stories by Mark Twain and Kipling and Dickens, they read even better aloud than silently, and are for almost any reader, of almost any age. Though Eric Knight invented them, they seem like genuine English folk tales. Their further virtues are rich characterizations; equal ease with fantasy and realism; dialect which is never phony, always funny.

Hero is a stubby, handle-bar-whiskered old Yorkshireman named Sam Small, a former millworker who invented the Small Self-Doffing Spindle and retired. He and his round, loose-tongued wife Mully talk and act with the comic simpleheartedness which might have developed, but never quite did, from the funny papers at their best. They are as kindly, cantankerous, well-hitched a couple as fiction has seen.

Though well-to-do, Sam still lives like any other Yorkshire villager-which means, among other things, that he inhabits a world in which wonder is still possible. One early Monday morning, for instance, the certitude develops among the mill hands that the days of the week are stuck, and it is still Sunday, a sinful day to work. Almost a week passes before Sam's acquaintance, the King (who talks a Yorkshire solid as cheese), helps straighten things out.

Another time Sam watched Black Cawper, the local strong man, fight an almost Icelandic battle on the moor, from dusk to dawn, with a supernatural blond giant. When Black lost, he said: "Ba gum, Ah'd like to tak' thee hoam and hev a pup off'n thee!" Black's son Ian was the first blond Cawper in generations.

Sam's greatest adventure began with the sudden conviction that he could fly.* For a while he just practiced Immelmann turns around the dining-room chandelier, in his nightshirt, but before he was done he had created an international situation, and he promised Mully never to fly again.

For a while he kept his promise, and contented himself drinking ale with Gaffer Sitherthwick and John Willie Braithwaite in The Spread Eagle and with explaining the mysteries of politics to a delightful collie bitch (who could talk). Then war caught up with Sam. As an auxiliary constable, with the help of an affectionate hound and a length of lead pipe, he caught two Nazi spies; later he felt forced to use his forbidden talent once again, to save England. In the course of that adventure he had to talk to Hitler ("Heil you!" said Sam, "Heil me!" Adolf replied) and, before he could get any sensible action at home, to his old chum, the King. Said His Majesty, gratefully: " 'Well, what would Britain do without the common men and women of Yorkshire?' " " 'Ah don't know,' Sam said. 'But it'll be a sad day if they ever try it.' "

Every rational detail in the book, from their fantastic hardheadedness to their still more fantastic menus, suggests that the King is right. Also suggested is the growing possibility that the author of This Above All (TIME, April 21) may yet become what the world has lacked for two genera tions: a major popular novelist.

* The Flying Yorkshireman made Knight famous when it first came out in 1936. Air-conditioned by NBC's Arch Oboler (1940), it has been repeatedly broadcast.

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