Word: novels
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Creator of these bookish detectives is tall, goggled Scenarist Harry Kurnitz, longtime mystery writer for pulp magazines, who writes under the false-whiskery pen name of Marco Page and the influence of Dashiell Hammett. His characters first appeared last spring in a spade-calling mystery novel, Fast Company, in which the main victim was poetically conked with a bust of Dante. Last summer Melvyn Douglas and Florence Rice played them first for cinema in MGM's fumigated version. In Fast and Loose, Robert Montgomery and Rosalind Russell show up as the likeliest pretenders to the places of William Powell...
Five years ago proletarian novels appeared, if not quite as frequently as the strikes they celebrated, at least more frequently than they have since. Leader of this radical literary movement was Grace Lumpkin, whose To Make My Bread was one of the first U. S. proletarian novels as well as one of the best. Last week she published her third novel, a slight, simple story of a Southern wedding, which is as far from the subject of her first book as a picket line is from a pulpit. The Wedding is an interesting novel in its own right...
...Rinehart pulled the lever again last week with another whopper, The Tree of Liberty (985 pages to 1,224 for Anthony Adverse). The book and the law of averages being what they are, no jackpot is likely to shower down. The Tree of Liberty, Elizabeth Page's first novel, took five years to write, will not take so long to read. Its breeziness is astounding, in view of the hot and heavy research the author did for it (32 huge collections of national, state, private records and letters, files of 26 periodicals, 183 biographies, histories, travel books, reference books...
Call My Brother Back, an autobiographical novel, starts off well with an account of a boyhood among the Ulster farmers and fishermen on Rathlin Island, peters out into unimaginative writing, although the last two-thirds of the story is laid in Belfast during the tense days of "the Trouble." For adult readers, the book will taste more like a piece of citron than a plum...
...author of this how-dy-do was one of the founders of the brash, short-lived Yale Harkness Hoot; at 21 wrote Challenge to Defeat, slapping the face of depression pessimists. In Hannibal Hooker, his first novel, he breezes past all moral and religious stop-signs. He is, in brief, a daring young man, and his agility on literary trapezes is breathtaking. But after his stunts are over, it is not quite clear what all the squirming and leaping were about...