Ham & Eggs

If hunger gnaws 20 minutes before train time, you make for the lunch counter and order--chicken a la King? Beef casserole? Braised pork? More likely, old dependable ham and eggs. They are too familiar to cause your palate much excitement, but as some one has said, they satisfy. Passing the newsstand, if your appetite for fiction is not to be trifled with by a mere magazine, do you pore over cryptic titles, flashy jackets, alluring blurbs? Hardly ever. Briskly, confidently, you seize an Oppenheim or a Dell, a Harry Leon Wilson, Sabatini, Irvin Cobb, Wallace Irwin, Arthur Train--not ham and eggs but just as reliable. A lot of fiction writers remain standard commodities whether you carry them out of the Gopher (Wyo.) Elite Drug Store or Brentano's.

The publisher's spring lists contain many a standard commodity. Mr. E. Phillips Oppenheim's vast museum now includes The Golden Beast (Little, Brown). Miss Ethel M. Dell submits A Man Under Authority (Putnam). Harvey O'Higgins has a successor to Julie Cane in Clara Barron (Harpers). Irvin Cobb's new tales, more pensive than usual, are all On an Island That Cost $24 (Doran). Katharine Haviland Taylor is out again, with Stanley Johns' Wife (Doran), and Albert Payson Terhune with Treasure (Harpers).

Arthur Train's book is The Blind Goddess (Scribner's). Kathleen Norris has written this time about English folk, in The Black Flemings (Doubleday, Page). Archibald Marshall collaborated with H. A. Vachell on Mote House Mystery (Dodd, Mead). Patricia Wentworth's latest is The Dower House Mystery (Small, Maynard).

Alice Duer Miller calls her new chronicle Instruments of Darkness (Dodd, Mead). Harold Bindloss can fill you again with western ozone on Pine Creek Ranch (Stokes). If you like H. C. ("Slanguage") Witwer, you will like Roughly Speaking (Putnam).

Sabatini is to the fore again with The Lion's Skin (Houghton, Mifflin). Connubial conventions go glimmering in Wallace Irwin's Mated (Putnam) and Reginald Wright Kauffman's Free Love (Macaulay). There is a full-blooded tale called Carib Gold (Bobbs-Merrill) by onetime U. S. All-Around Athletic Champion Ellery H. Clark, and a new Alaskan tale, Child of the Wild (Cosmopolitan) by Edison Marshall (The Sleeper of the Moonlit Ranges, Seward's Folly, etc.).

You will hear a lot about Sheila Kaye-Smith's Starbrace (Dutton). She wrote it some years ago while growing up to write The George and the Crown., Isle of Thorns, etc. It's about a lovable but deplorable young Midlands bucko back in England's border-war time, a good tale withal but not on the same counter with mature Kaye- Smithiana.

For staple goods, a staple price; each and every one costs two dollars. If you have not chosen yet, ask that newsdealer to hand you Rodomont (Putnam) by H. Bedford-Jones. Therein two shrewd and muscular sons of American forests swash and buckle about the craggy slopes of Mont St. Michel in the days of Louis XIV. Ham and eggs? Not precisely, but the same principle.