The premise is kind of excellent, to a point, and if the book had revolved around Owen Jephson, underwriter for Lloyd’s of London, I think I would have liked it more. Jephson specializes in insuring incedibly peculiar things: he’s insured an actor against losing weight, a duchess against rain at her garden party, etc. I want very badly for Herbert George Jenkins to have written a book about Jephson, but sadly the world doesn’t work that way. And Biggers is more concerned first with Allan, Lord Harrowby, who wants to insure his wedding date, and then, more centrally, with Dick Minot, who Lloyd’s sends to Florida and protect their assets by making sure that Harrowby’s wedding to the beautiful Cynthia Meyrick goes as planned. Minot, inevitably, falls in love with Cynthia almost at first sight, and that’s only the first of many complications — there are jewel thieves, long-lost relatives, blackmail, and a society matron who hires a guy to write bon mots for her. And that list barely scrapes the surface.

In general, I really, really like about the first 3/4 of any given Earl Derr Biggers book, but this one felt more consistent. I never liked it as much as the beginning of Seven Keys to Baldpate or The Agony Column, but I liked it pretty much equally all the way through. Possibly that was because it was pretty intensely predictable, but that was okay, beasue it was all pretty silly and fun, too.

This is one of those books I sort of vaguely like but can’t work up any enthusiasm about, and I don’t know whether that’s my fault, or if it’s that Biggers didn’t expend any effort on characterization, or that the most interesting character disappeared after the first few chapters or what. I suspect a lot of people will enjoy it more than I did.

It's hard to tell in the picture, but this is a really big tote bag.

I usually limit myself to as many books as I can carry in my hands, so when my arms started to hurt, I went to check out. But once I’d gotten my books into my bag, the woman at the counter said, “you know, there are more books in the other building.” That was my downfall.

Anyway, here are the things I got, in reverse order as I unpack.

I didn’t buy all the Nero Wolfe books — just the cuter, older paperbacks and In the Best Families because it’s In the Best Families. Apparently my cat likes Nero Wolfe too.

Not the Felix Salten one with the deer, but the Marjorie Benton Cooke one with the people. The woman who helped me check out said she heard it was pretty racy, which seems unlikely, but I told her I would be pleased if that turned out to be the case.

I keep meaning to try Mary Stewart. And at this point I had well over $10 worth of books, so these were basically free.

Some miscellaneous paperbacks–One Hundred  and One Dalmatians  because my copy is missing pages, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold because I can’t find my mom’s copy, and a romance by Meredith Duran for no reason at all.

This is the Mary Roberts Rinehart portion of the haul. All of these books are more battered than all of the other books, but who cares? I own a copy of K
now.

This is the Ethel M. Dell portion of the haul. I…own a copy of The Way of an Eagle now. So, uh, that’s a thing.

The last few miscellaneous things: Rose in Bloom, my favorite Alcott book I’ve never owned; Trustee from the Toolroom, which I buy whenever I find it so I can give it as a gift; and Brat Farrar, which I own a couple of times over, because this copy is super cute. I assume the girl in the sheet on the cover is Eleanor, but I don’t understand why.

Now that I’ve read a couple of reviews of the play, though, everything makes sense. The last third or so of the book, the section full of unpleasant people and awkward situations that made me wonder why I had liked anyone or been invested in the book up to that point — that was the bulk of the play. The first half or so, in which John Hemingway goes to Paris and is desperately lonely until he meets and begins a relationship with American-born Inez de Pierrefond is apparently original to the book.

John is a nice but occasionally super depressed architect studying at the École des Beaux-Arts. Inez is from Louisiana, and is about as French as one can get while still being an American, and is technically a widow, although she left her horrible and possibly German husband before he died. They meet in a treehouse, which is kind of great. Their relationship is pretty interesting. There’s a lot of very trite bits, but John is pretty convincingly torn between his attraction for Inez and his morals. He’s also pretty convincingly a massive dork. And Inez is pretty awesome, and eventually wins him over to her way of thinking, including the idea that marriage is a prison.

That one, obviously, isn’t going to go over well in John’s hometown of Delphi, OH. And John’s transformation when they get back there makes sense, although it’s kind of disappointing. And I guess that’s how I feel about everything else that happens in Delphi, too. I keep wanting to say that everyone is out of character, but I can’t put my finger on any specific way in which that’s true. And it’s not terrible, but after the Paris section, which I was really enjoying, it’s disappointing.

Now that I know roughly what was in the play, I keep falling into the trap of thinking of the Delphi section as Hurlbut’s work and the Paris section as Fenollosa’s, which isn’t fair because Fenollosa wrote the whole book. Also, not having read the play, I don’t want to make assumptions. I guess I’ll have to try one of Fenollosa’s other books at some point, to see how she does on her own.

The Mystery has a Frankenstein-esque framing narrative, which takes place aboard a Navy ship, the Wolverine. The ship is sort of wandering around the ocean, blowing up wrecks, when it comes across a schooner called the Laughing Lass. This is odd for two reasons: first, that the Laughing Lass had disappeared two years before with eminent scientist Dr. Schermerhorn, journalist Ralph Slade, and its captain and crew. The second reason is that the ship is entirely uninhabited, beyond the dead bodies of a few rats. That, and there’s food and still-warm ashes from a fire, so the Laughing Lass can’t have been unmanned for long. Then…well, more mysterious stuff happens. And eventually one of a large number of missing people shows up and tells his story, and it’s absorbing and awful.

I usually have trouble with books fueled by impending doom, but not here. Or rather, I was pretty freaked out the entire time I was reading, but not in my usual, irrationally upset about bad things that haven’t happened yet way. Actually, I think I might have been reacting to it the way people are supposed to react to scary books and movies but that I never do. I mean, I’m not going to start reading more scary stuff, because I’m still a wuss, but I’m closer to understanding the appeal than I was a week ago.

I should probably also mention the animal slaughter. There was a lot of it. It was very effectively horrible in the traditional sense of the word, and I can’t believe I managed to get all the way through it. I just — there are a lot of dead seals, okay? A lot.

In conclusion: way to go, Samuel Hopkins Adams. I trusted you, and now I don’t. And I guess it could just be Stewart Edward White at fault, but, not having a whole lot of information on the subject, I’m going to blame them equally.

Helen knows that Andrew is likely to buy it, and, having bought it, even more likely to go off with it leaving her in charge of the farm again, so instead she buys it herself, and sets out with Mifflin to learn the trade. And although Helen is fat — according to her own description — and just shy of forty, and Mifflin is short, bald and redheaded, the story goes on very much as it would if they were, say, the caravaning pair in Diane of the Green Van.

I probably wanted Parnassus on Wheels to be either a little bit lighter or a little bit more serious, and I definitely wanted it to be a lot more leisurely than it was, but basically everything is as it should be, and I’m not in a mood to criticize it for not being perfect. I mean, it’s not my new favorite book, but it should be someone’s. There a sort of sequel, apparently, called The Haunted Bookshop, and I’m very much looking forward to reading it.

So, Consuelo Barrett. My favorite thing about her is that when she first meets Ipsydoodle Smith — who has just offered to make her a movie star — she tells him her name and he thinks she’s joking, because it’s such a perfect movie star name. Actually, that’s not my favorite thing about her. My favorite thing about her is her. Connie Barrett is one of those fictional heroines who is frank and straightforward and subtly classy, which is both a thing I really enjoy and a thing Adams does really, really well.

Connie is in New York looking for a job, and after running into Ipsy Smith at Coney Island and getting his recommendation to Gerstel Corss, an Upper West Side hairdresser, she finds one. She learns how to give all the “treatments” and is soon a fully-fledged “operator.” And when Gerstel Corss’ salon closes after a woman ends up with green hair, she doesn’t have much trouble joining her friend “Bob” Roberts at Primavera, a salon on Fifth Avenue.

Bob is pretty awesome, too — she comes from a totally different world than Connie does, but you never feel like that’s a bad thing. Yeah, she’s in the book because Connie has to have a friend, but she sometimes almost feels like she isn’t. She gets to have an inner life.

The other three main characters are the men: Ipsydoodle Smith, Rowdy Pontefract, and Waller Daniels. No, Rowdy’s name isn’t really Rowdy, but his manner is, when he’s drunk. Yes, Ipsydoodle’s name is really Ipsydoodle, but it’s his middle name. This is so Samuel Hopkins Adams, in that it’s kind of twee and irritating, but it turns out that Adams’ occasional twee and irritating moments work a lot better in a book that’s occasionally kind of dark. Although, to be fair, it’s still Samuel Hopkins Adams. Even a murder can’t make it particularly dark.

Ipsy Smith enters the story at Coney Island, where he flirts with Connie and sets her on her path towards becoming a cosmetologist. By the time they meet again, they’ve become friends. He’s a bit of a mysterious figure — everyone knows and likes him, but it’s rarely clear what he’s up to. Connie meets Rowdy Pontefract outside Gerstel Corss’ salon. He’s a girl-shy overgrown boy with an alcohol problem, but he overcomes his girl-shyness in order to fall in love with Constance.

Then there’s Waller Daniels, one of those vastly wealthy, notoriously ruthless businessmen you find in books. They’re never quite as ruthless as people think they are, but Daniels almost is. He’s also Rowdy Pontefract’s uncle, and once he gets to know Connie, he’s absolutely in favor of her becoming Rowdy’s mistress, or even marrying him. I love any and all scenes between Connie and Ipsydoodle, but I think my favorite relationship in The Flagrant Years is the one that springs up between Connie and Waller Daniels. My fondness for fictional cranky middle-aged men aside, every interaction between them is just…interesting. Really interesting.

Poking around on the internet for information about Samuel Hopkins Adams, I learned that in the ’20s he published some books under the name Warner Fabian, apparently because they were too scandalous to publish under his own name. And sure, fair enough. But having read The Flagrant Years, I’m a lot more curious about how racy the Warner Fabian novels were, because it’s full of casual sexual relationships and even women talking about their sexuality, and I would have thought that if there were books not fit for Adams’ real name, this would have been one of them.

Anyway, if it’s not clear, I liked this a lot. There are times when Adams’s irrepressible charm is a bit too much for me, and having it tempered with a little bit of tragedy and what I assume Adams thinks is realism makes it just about perfect. I don’t know if he could write a sad or realistic book, but I like what happens when he tries.

When you hand in your slips, you get a number. Then you go to the other room and wait while people go find your book and send it up to the reading room in what’s basically a big dumbwaiter. There’s an LCD screen there showing all of the numbers that have books waiting. When your number comes up, you go up to the desk, show them your library card and get to take your books to a table, where you can read and gaze raptly at the ceiling every once in a while. The ceiling looks like this.

This is how you get access to all of the popular fiction that’s no longer in circulation. You used to be able to get pretty much anything on no notice, but now they store a lot of the books off-site. Look things up in the online catalog before you show up. What you’re looking for is things that say “In-library use only” and specify the item’s location as “Schwarzman Building – Main Reading Room 315″. The ones stored off-site are labeled “Available by request”. They only started moving stuff off-site recently, so I haven’t tried requesting yet.

I meant to start this post with something more along the lines of, “Yesterday I want to the library and read kind of a delightful book by Samuel Hopkins Adams,” but I guess I got a little carried away. Perhaps Adams’ venture into the world of 1920s beauty parlors is a subject for another post.

The girl in question is Joan Carthew. Abandoned by her actress mother at a young age, Joan lives in a Brighton boarding house and works as a household drudge for the mean proprietress. Eventually she gets fed up and runs away, but instead of, I don’t know, looking for work or begging or something, Joan throws herself under the wheels of a wealthy woman’s carriage and uses her subsequent injury to insinuate her way into the woman’s house. Joan is, at this point, twelve. Yeah, she’s kind of a badass.

Lady Thorndyke takes Joan in, sends her to finishing school, and eventually adopts her, but then she dies, having neglected to update her will, and Joan is left penniless again. That’s okay though, because she still has the following:

•    Her finishing school education
•    A fashionable and expensive wardrobe
•    Brains
•    Beauty
•    Confidence
•    Knowledge of shorthand and typewriting

With these, she embarks on her career as a con-woman. Other people call her an adventuress, and she apparently thinks of herself as a highwayman (“rather a gallant one”), but basically she makes her living off conning people. It’s great.

She starts by taking the job that George Gallon grudgingly offers her after Lady Thorndyke dies. She makes herself extremely valuable there for long enough to pick up some knowledge of a secret business deal, which she manages to parlay into two months living on a yacht on the Riviera and a few hundred pounds for spending money. That interlude doesn’t go on for as long as she’d like, but Joan escapes unscathed and is soon in Cornwall, going by the name “Mercy Milton” and getting her landlady and the girl she used to babysit well established in life. That episode leaves Joan with little money, but the landlady’s house in Bloomsbury now belongs to her, and going forward it becomes her home base, the place where she stays in between adventures.

Basically, everything is awesome. Joan manages to be both ruthless and human in a way that really surprised me. In most books of this type — books about adventuresses, I guess — the heroine is only allowed to be capable and independent up to a point. It’s as if heroines of this kind are being allowed to take on a male role, having agency and adventures, but have to return to a passive female role in order to have a happy ending. Either that or they’re horribly punished. Joan does, inevitably, fall in love and settle down of the end of the book, but for the bulk of it, she’s allowed to play both the male and female roles simultaneously, lying and stealing and acting as a protector to other women but also caring about people and examining her feelings and things.

I found the ending to be incredibly abrupt. It was the thing I liked the least about the book. But I wonder if it was sort of on purpose — if A.M. Williamson didn’t want to add in the romance at all but thought she had to. I think she had to, too, but not in a bad way, and I wish she’d drawn out that portion of the story more. It’s interesting, though, that Joan’s love interest seems to be there mostly to affirm that Joan is a good person. She’s not particularly happy about the way she’s lived, but he tells her over and over again that everything she’s done has been okay. I want to wait at least one more Alice without Charlie book before I declare this a trend, but I hope this theme of good women doing bad things without being made to seem like bad women continues. It’s pretty cool.

Billy Deering has just lost a whole pile of bonds he embezzled from his dad’s company and is kind of in a snit about it when he arrives home to be told by the butler that his friend Mr. Hood has come to stay. Billy doesn’t know any Mr. Hood, and he’s afraid his visitor is a detective or something, come to arrest him, but it turns out that R. Hood (Robin, obviously) is a tanned and and shabby (but somehow distinguished) gentleman who has come to take Billy on an adventure. He’s full of stories about consorting with crooks of various kinds, is probably being followed by detectives, and travels with a chauffeur he calls Cassowary and who he claims is a millionaire who can’t be trusted with his own money.

They set out in search of the girl who accidentally took Billy’s suitcase instead of her own at Grand Central, and promptly run into a) a girl in a clown costume dancing in the moonlight and calling herself Pierette, b) a girl calling herself Babette and wearing a maid’s costume who clearly isn’t a maid, and c) the suitcase full of bonds. Further along, they find d) an elderly gentleman calling himself Pantaloon and e) his middle-aged but attractive daughter, Columbine. Also f) Billy’s sister, who is not in California where she’s supposed to be, and g) Billy’s father, who’s in jail. Most of these people have things to say about a novel, also called The Madness of May, that, from the characters’ reactions to it, is probably better than this book. Eventually everyone except Pantaloon and Billy’s dad get paired off.

Hood and characters a), b), d) and e) are, throughout, theoretically spouting nonsense. Actually, though, it’s not as nonsensical as they think it is, and they vary it by berating Billy for not joining them in their whimsy. Of course, most of the crazy things that happen to Billy turn out to be orchestrated, but just how orchestrated they are might surprise you. Probably nothing else will, except maybe that Billy doesn’t know who William Blake is.

I know I say this all the time, but I didn’t dislike this book as much as it sounds like I did. I just found it uninspired and unconvincing on a small scale. Before I started writing about books on a regular basis, I didn’t really understand what people meant when they said writers should show, not tell. I think I get it now: you can’t just say, “everyone had a great time,” because even if a reader is perfectly happy to believe you, they’re not going to really feel like everyone had a good time unless you show them. You can’t just say that jokes are funny; they have to actually be funny. No matter how much you suspend disbelief, if there’s no supporting evidence for what the author is telling you, you’re going to feel dissatisfied. That’s how I felt after reading The Madness of May, and that’s how I felt after reading Nicholson’s A Reversible Santa Claus.