Suave Agility

THE FORTUNATE WAYFARER--E. Phillips Oppenheim--Little Brown ($2.00).

Eighty thousand pounds--and yet by the merest chance had Martin Barnes, commercial traveler, strolled out of his shabby hotel, and past the strange old house. But Lord Ardrington, on the point of death, was contemptuous alike of charities and his rightful heir, and chose therefore to bestow the -L-80,000, in notes, upon the first passerby. Martin, filling that simple requirement, walked out of his commercial existence into a congenial life of valets, and books, and motor cars, but no friends. This might soon have palled had he not become further involved with his benefactor--who did not die after all. Years before, the exciting climax to Lord Ardrington's checkered career in South America had been a bitter trick played on his two partners, villains both. These two worked their way to prosperity as American bootleggers, and came at last to London, still snarling and snorting for revenge. Their sophisticated method was the slow, subtle torture of intimidation; their exquisite object, that black-eyed mignon, Ardrington's adopted daughter. They employed for their villainous purposes thugs from London's underworld, and a beautiful Spanish matron whom they installed at the Ritz. But they had not reckoned with Martin's cool audacity, nor his marriageability, nor the girl he loved. And they had not reckoned with Oppenheim's suave agility in leading his knaves through smooth intricacies to their just desserts.

Last year Author Oppenheim passed his literary centennial, and still his pen flows pleasantly on, delighting tired doctor, lawyer, merchant, businessman. Though his 103 plots bear a family resemblance, they are often distinguished, as here, by novel features of mystery and intrigue.