Class of ’29

Class of ’29, by Orrie Lashin and Milo Hastings, is the most depressing play I’ve ever read. Not that I’ve read a huge number of depressing plays, but I think it’s fair to say that this one is pretty miserable. It certainly ends miserably, with even the one funny character sharing in the general bad luck.

Left End Edwards

Since I was pretty pleased with The New Boy at Hilltop, I decided to read another Ralph Henry Barbour, Left End Edwards. Now, either Barbour is better at short stories than novels, “Barbour” is a pseudonym for multiple people, some of whom could write better than others, or this book has no excuse for being stupid. I did try to figure out whether Barbour was a pseudonym — I got suspicious when the advertisements at the end of the book were all for Stratemeyer series — and I couldn’t find anything specific, but on the whole I think it wasn’t. Some of the other titles credited to Barbour seem to be romances, which makes it look like he was one guy with a couple of niches. There were certainly Stratemeyer pseudonyms that were credited with multiple series, but they tend to be in the same vein — Laura Lee Hope with “The Bobbsey Twins” and “Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue”, or Alice Emerson with “Ruth Fielding” and “Betty Gordon” — and they were all children’s books.

I’m quite willing to accept the excuse that he was better with short stories, but the fact remains that this book requires an excuse. See, there’s this idiot named Steve — a fifteen year old boy who’s supposed to be pretty good at football. And there’s his best friend, an idiot named Tom who’s only supposed to be okay at football but who does have an incredibly small amount of common sense, which is more than I can say for Steve.