Another Wallace

THE SILVER KEY--Edgar Wallace-- Doubleday, Doran ($1).*

Mr. Washington Wirth was an eccentric millionaire. Nobody knew anything about him except that he liked to give expensive parties at one of London's most expensive hotels, that the guests were chosen with care but were an odd lot. The morning after one of these affairs a petty crook was found murdered in a taxi. A little later young Dick Allenby's patented air-rifle was stolen, Banker Leo Moran left England in a hurry, rich old Hervey Lyne was found dead in his bath-chair while his servant read the paper to him, Man-about-Town Jerry Dornford's body was discovered in a swamp, and murderous attacks were made on pretty Mary Lane. Inspector Surefoot Smith, hard-working brains of Scotland Yard, thought there was some connection between all these events, but it was Mary Lane who finally supplied him with the key.

The Silver Key is unusual among detective stories in that the murderer is discovered well before the end, and the final running-down and capture give you not an anticlimax but an added suspense. Few writers of this kind of fiction take the trouble to make their characters more lifelike than dressmakers' dummies; Author Wallace gives his a kind of solid humor that makes them appear, if not quite lifelike, at least typical of plain human beings.

*Published Nov. 21.

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