MISCHIEF

By Ben Ames Williams. E. P. Dutton & Cos., Inc. New York. Mr. Williams is a maker of plots. He seems aWe to take a character here and a character to put them down in Maine at a place he calls Fraternity, and mixes them all up at a country store. Then he takes a lonely house, and a mystery about people living there, two strange women, a recluse "Mischief" Judd, a stranger with a distinctly foreign accent, upon whom "Mischief" plays one of his tricks and the stage is set for drama. The result is entertaining reading.

It is so with most of Mr. Williams' books. The plots make interesting reading. When it comes to characters he achieves in this book as in most of his others a certain definite effect based for the most part on the incident in which the character finds himself. I said in the first paragraph that Mischief approaches a drama. Indeed I think it would make an excellent play, entertaining and lively. The leading character of the book Judd lends himself very well to dramatic action. He overdoes himself a little when he struggles through a swamp with a dead man over his shoulder, but he is very lifelike and human and in every way interesting when he trails Bert Saladine to the house in which his estranged wife and the mysterious woman live, and he is at his best in the grocery store when he succeeds in making Joe Suter drop a twenty pound bag of sugar on the floor.

From that point on "Mischief" turns upon Bert who points him out as the cause of the sugar outrage. He is by nature a sour man. He is a small man and finds expression of his meanness in playing tricks upon people in a way that puts them in a bad light. One suspects that he broke down Chet McAusland's walls and let his cows into the garden; one would like to believe that he was the cause of the frost that nipped summer gardens in 1918, he chuckled so much about it; and one suspects that he pushed Will Bissell's old sow over the wall and nearly killed it and did kill the unborn litter He did overdo himself however when he sent the foreign stranger round by the wrong road and told him to stop at a "friendly" house. Murder came out of that, which he gleefully planted on Bert's shoulders in revenge for the sugar incident.

Mischief differs from Mr. Williams' best book Spendor in that Spendor is a novel of character, this of plot. But Mr. Williams' plots, as plots, are of a very high order.