niscience, he has become as tangible a figure in our minds and as firmly fixed chronologically as Chinese Gordon or the G. O. M., Dizzy or the Diamond Jubilee. It is three or four years now since his last bow was made, but he holds his own with the younger men whose prototype he is, the surprisingly staccatto Nayland Smith of Fu Manchu connection or the scientifically minded Craig Kennedy.

Emerging then with honors from the school of Conan Doyle, our type in the two decades of the new century, since Holmes belongs actually in the nineteenth, keeps pace with invention and the

sciences to the unbounded development of his resource. He becomes a trifle less dignified perhaps, he begins to overdress a trifle, but he is packed with a terrible knowledge and a ruthlessness that would have surprised even the forbidding Professor Moriarty of Conan Doyle. It is chiefly with Sax Rohmer and Arthur B. Reeve that this development takes place and to Mr. Rohmer must the credit go for creating the most unforgettable criminal character in this field of fiction. "The Insidious Doctor Fu Manchu" with his giant and poisonous fungi, his scorpions and bloated spiders, his dacoits and evil henchmen, moves as in a yellow mist of venom through stories whose fault lies chiefly in an exaggeration of horror, a clapping of Pelion upon Ossa, until the mind, shocked at first into a flame of interest, becomes eventually dulled.

"The Return of Doctor Fu Manchu" was an event much looked forward to. He returned, as ever the incarnation of evil; as ever urbane, soft-spoken, deadly, and in every page nearly accomplished the erasure of Nayland Smith and his somewhat stuffy friend Petrie. Nearly, but not quite, and we breathed again. Nayland Smith, be it said, measures up very fairly with his brethren in the suppression of crime save for one characteristic which not uncommonly irritates the reader to a pitch of frenzy. The poor

man is unable to speak with any continuity. He does not, in fact, speak at all. He "raps." He "jerks." He "barks." To have been able to drawl would have saved him. There are times when it seems as if, after all, Dr. Fu Manchu might be justified in getting a bit of his own back, but our allegiance

does not long wander. That sinister Chinaman chills the spine and makes the simple process of turning out the light and getting into bed an unbelievable penance. Mr. Rohmer, in his latest books "The Brood of the Witch Queen" and "Grey Face," excells in workman

ship and a certain scholarly

handling of his material these earlier tales. "Grey Face" in particular, is an extremely clever thriller, the mechanism of which recalls somewhat the fascinatingly cryptic stories of Algernon Blackwood, whose hero, John Silence, is after all the peer, though in a slightly different field, of Holmes himself.

Arthur B. Reeve, while his criminals are the more familiar type whose capture or demise we sometimes read of in the papers, created Craig Kennedy, a character the more impressive because the solutions that he arrives at are accomplished with a touch of genuine scientific ability. He does not, like Rohmer, rely on the inscrutable East for a sinister glamour, but on the commonplace surroundings with which we are all familiar-New York, Long Island, any American city. And who shall say that his method is less effective, for as a corpse in the thoroughly unexciting milieu of a tomato bed is more terrifying than one on a silken divan in a harem transplanted to Half Moon Street, so usually is crime stalking unexpectedly through streets with whose every inch we are familiar, more fearful than if it were staring horridly from a setting whose very unfamiliarity half hints. at the existence of foul play.

Equal to any one, perhaps, in the achievement of an atmosphere of downright flesh freezing terror, is the versatile Mary

Roberts Rinehart when she thitherward turns her pen. "The Circular Staircase," later dramatized under the title of "The Bat," is an example, and "The After House" whose plot obviously enough is gathered from a sensational murder of twenty or more years ago that some may

yet remember, the axe killings upon the sailing vessel Herbert Fuller which were never solved, though the Mate, a slightly negrescent individual named Bram, was twice tried for them, is another. Anna Katharine Greene is a veteran influence in the field and she it is who presented to her readers that subtlest

marred, alas, but in his time "The Lone Wolf" promised brilliantly, and after all, the number of his followers to-day does not denote that this promise was entirely belied.

of daggers, the icicle, which, having accomplished its mission and slain its victim, melted ruddily away into nothing.

Louis Joseph Vance and Frank L. Packard share between them the distinction of having created two very debonair crooks whose crimes, however, may hardly so be called, since in the final analysis and somewhat paradoxically, their sequels are beneficial to society. Packard's conception, Jimmy Dale, anonymously hidden behind the cognomen "Gray Seal" is a gentleman, a member of exclusive clubs and endowed with plenty of money, whose hobby is housebreaking and safe cracking. This hobby he frequently indulges, but somehow or other his victims are always rogues and like Robin o' Lincoln, he harms not the needy or deserving. "The Adventures of Jimmy Dale" divert one but do not entirely escape that pitfall that lies in the path of all such a certain monotony of execution and lack of freshness in plot.

Louis Joseph Vance succeeds better. "The Lone Wolf" though in these latter days grown less convincing, started out as an extremely interesting and highly cultured criminal with the instincts of a sportsman and no mean one into the bargain. Paris was his favorite playground and he knew it thoroughly and it was not without regret that we remarked his reformation and really inexcusable lapse into love of woman. A young man

Without much question of doubt if one were to be asked who was the best known author of such books, however, E. Phillips Oppenheim would be the answer. In the first place he is so astonishingly prolific as to defy obscurity and in the second, his plots and characters are genuinely interesting. It is difficult to choose one book from three score, but at a hazard "The Great Impersonation" would be the choice. With Oppenheim, as it was some years ago with E. W. Hornung whose genial "Raffles" pursued a questionable career with perfect urbanity, our type becomes less emotional and more cerebral. There is little hair-raising circumstance in Oppenheim, nothing, really, which would challenge the reader's interest to the extent of causing him to leap three feet straight in the air were someone to drop something on the floor back of him. But there is the challenge to one's wits and it is there that, curiously enough, he secures a tremendous following among busy men who seek in their hours of freedom relaxation in figuring out the problems that Oppenheim sets them. Melville Davisson Post is another who applies to the construction of his stories a sound knowledge of some one thing and depends not entirely on his imagination. Mr. Post possesses knowledge of many things, including law, and it was his familiarity with this last that completed the effect of that admirable if gruesome short story "The Corpus Delicti."

Not even the briefest survey of the treatment accorded our type in the hands of writers either American by birth or by virtue of their public would be adequate without mention of Richard Washburn Child's "The Velvet Black." This collection of masterly short stories like those of Wadsworth Camp in the "Communicating Door" fringes now and again upon

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the supernatural. Barely, it is true, but enough to heighten immeasurably suspense and interest. Child creates no one

figure, neither a criminal nor detective, who appears in all the stories. They are on the contrary individual and separate, and the impression each makes is perfectly incisive. Dealing with the characters of the underworld they produce them in the reader's mind as though they had been flashed by the cinema upon a screen before the eyes, such is the vivid quality of the prose employed. As a craftsman, Child is the superior of any of his companions in this field, with the possible exception of Rohmer or Post.

Our type, then, reaches with this latest school, a versatility in mystery and crime beyond the soberer phase of his apprenticeship with Conan Doyle. And at the same time he acquires a polish in such inspired hands as G. K. Chesterton's that the other authors that we have named have failed to give him. The tales in "The Wisdom of Father Brown" and "The Innocence of Father Brown" mark the apogee in English literature of the story of mystery and its solution and they are written in the style of one of the greatest prose masters of to-day. Chesterton's is a great, a curiously contradictory, inquisitive and profound intellect, and it follows logically enough that, equipped as he is, his stories of this type will surpass any others unless, perhaps, G. B. S. has in a fit of levity written some and hidden them away so that none save his literary executors, providing he can persuade anyone to act in such a capacity, may find them. Father Brown, one feels, would make a monkey-a dignified, solemn and somewhat ridiculous monkey -out of Sherlock Holmes. He would in He would in the magnificent simplicity of his method, reduce Craig Kennedy to tears. Fu Manchu would yield utterly to his per

sonality and doubtless become a lama. giving up his devilish contrivances and villainous soft speech for the Om Mane Padme Om of some far and sainted lamassery. Father Brown is fittingly enough in wisdom and in guile, the father Confessor of them all, clever criminal and cleverer investigator together. And in what rich and subtle English are his triumphant solutions recorded. Take the opening paragraph of "The Sign of the Broken Sword."

The thousand arms of the forest were grey, and its million fingers silver. In a sky of dark

green-blue-like slate the stars were bleak and brilliant like splintered ice. All that thickly wooded and sparsely tenanted countryside was stiff with a bitter and brittle frost. The black hollows between the trunks of the trees looked like bottomless, black caverns of that Scandinavian hell, a hell of incalculable cold. Even the square stone tower of the church looked northern to the point of heathenry, as if it were some barbaric tower among the sea rocks of Iceland. It was a queer night for anyone to explore a churchyard. But on the other hand, perhaps it was worth exploring.

Both churchyard and story are worth a thousand explorations. The description of the one and the telling of the other are masterpieces, as indeed are, taken as a whole, all the adventures of this marvelous cleric. The mystery story has always remained and perhaps always will remain somewhat outside the circle of serious literature, although there is no good reason for its doing so save that great authors have but seldom turned

their brains and pens to its creation, but Chesterton has succeeded single-handed in lifting it higher than it has been at any other time in its history. There is no more serious nor yet more fascinating literature today than these short stories, and although they wrestle with no weighty social problem nor do they chronicle some notable romance they are worthy of a place in any library of worthwhile books.

Rose Macaulay, yet another author of genuine distinction, has contributed to

the development of the type though in an appreciably lighter vein and with an easy and fugitive wit alien to the American authors and perhaps to the masculine mind in general, for not even Chesterton evinces it, though as it has been noted, his short stories are eminently serious. "The Mystery at Geneva" is, one feels, a charming satire on the League of Nations primarily and an equally charming little mystery without bloodshed or violence into the bargain, but only into the bargain. Certainly it does not thrill, nor is it intended to do so. It is merely like Arnold Bennett's "The Grand Babylon Hotel" a diverting piece of virtuosity.

It is in France that the type reverts to his original function of reducing the reader to a state of nerves. Gaboriau, the dean of the mystery story almost from its beginning, wrote books of them that so beguiled a Prime Minister of Great Britain that, save apparently when the House was in the throes of a vote of confidence, he was never without one. More recently, Gaston Leroux and Maurice Leblanc have created characters thoroughly able to cope with most of their English or American compeers. Leroux achieved in Rouletabille an investigator reminiscent in his apparently harmless simplicity of the immortal priest of Chesterton. "The Mystery of the Yellow Room" is a notable thriller, cleverly and unextravagantly handled. But Rouletabille fades into obscurity in comparison with Lupin, the famous or notorious Arsène of Leblanc. This altogether fascinating criminal preys, like Jimmy Dale, on none but the unrighteous and the wicked. A man of many aliases, always aristocratic, he appears now as a Spanish nobleman, now as a Russian Prince, and plays the game of justifiable crime with a dash that is absolutely of the Gaul and irresistibly attractive. There are no enemies so cruel, so brutal, and so meriting of extinction as the enemies of Lupin and just as there is no one quite so clever, so strong, so courageous, as he is, so are the ladies who fall in love with him, utterly beyond compare in beauty and appeal. The adventures of Arsène are many and en

thralling. Possibly "The Teeth of the Tiger," the "Hollow Needle," and the "Crystal Stopper" show him at his invincible best. Arsène Lupin is the French Sherlock Holmes and Craig Kennedy in one. He is an astonishingly effective amalgam of all the famous investigators of the type, and it is earnestly to be hoped that old age will never steal upon him nor senescence mar those admirable mental and physical qualities.

And so our type, grown cosmopolitan and not a little distinguished, stands in the group of companion fiction as proudly and as worthy of attention as any there. It must be remembered that a Prime Minister consorted with him, that Woodrow Wilson, a President of the United States, was very fain of his company and that such an organizer and executive as Herbert Hoover even now is avowedly his friend. These comprise only the minimum of his distinguished admirers. As to the rest, the world is full of them. Passing and repassing before bookstands and kiosks in New York and London and Paris, the publics stop, scrutinize, hesitate a moment perhaps, but always buy.

"We dare you to read the first three pages"-and that dare is always taken.