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THE SOFT SPOT—A. S. M. Hutchinson —Little, Brown ($2.50). Twelve years ago the huge success of the novel If Winter Comes caused its shy author, Arthur Stuart Menteth Hutchinson, to flee precipitately from England to the Balearic Islands. The success of Author Hutchinson's latest tome, The Soft-Spot, a painfully mannered and prolix dissection of an Englishman with a talent for sponging, should cause him no such embarrassment whatever. Stephen Wain developed the habit of living off his half-brother Maxwell, a wealthy explorer, when they shared diggings in Bayswater, where Stephen studied architecture. Later, as a practicing architect, he was too obliging to examine closely the shoddy materials his friends the contractors supplied him. Consequently he got a bad reputation, lapsed into weak self-pity. When his brother decided to reside in England permanently, Stephen managed to join him again, began to let his business slide. Maxwell bought "Shipmates," the country seat of Sir Nigel Fearless, a bankrupt baronet, who promptly proceeded to drown himself as a family tradition required. Great was Stephen's resentment when his brother fell in love with the baronet's widow, made a will in her favor. He felt that he had been unjustly cheated out of an inheritance. When Maxwell tried to take an innocent-looking but impossible jump in the hunting field. Stephen did not bother to warn him, let him break his neck instead. Then Stephen quietly suppressed the will by which his brother's estate went to Lady Fearless and her small son Nigel, and took possession himself. Conveniently, Lady Fearless was drowned as her husband had been. Young Nigel, whisked away by an itinerant tinker, was brought up in ignorance of his birth. His new position enabled Stephen to marry well, prosper mightily in business. But he was haunted by his memories, superstitiously felt that his luck was too good to last. At length he fled secretly to the Malay archipelago. There he met an Englishwoman with a past as plaguey as his own and shared an island with her for three idyllic months. She swam out to the sharks when he asked her to share his hut. Heartbroken, Stephen returned to England to discover that his daughter had unknowingly fallen in love with young Nigel, now grown up and endowed with an Oxford accent. Inspired by an evangelist who exhorts him to "tune in on the Universal Spirit," Stephen rescues his brother's will from a burning home, on his deathbed restores the 14th Sir Nigel Fearless to his ancestral seat. The 14th Sir Nigel takes Stephen's daughter with him. For Author Hutchinson, an ounce of moralizing is worth a pound of narration. Beginning as a valid study in character degeneration, The Soft Spot becomes steadily more tiresome by its heavy underscoring of the obvious.
*Last week H. C. Frick Coke Co. was the storm-centre of the New Deal's greatest labor trouble (see p. 11).