Mr. Pirn Passes By Again

MR. PIM--A. A. Milne--Dutton ($2.50).

Author Alan Alexander Milne won many an audience with his play Mr. Pim Passes By. For those who remain to be won, for those who would like to be won again, he has made his play into a novel.

To the almost excessively well-ordered home of George Marden. English country gentleman, comes Mr. Pim, a gentle, absent-minded old man. seeking a letter of introduction. He gets it and ambles off, leaving the household in ruins. For Olivia, George's wife, has been married before, to a scalawag whose fraudulent stock-company transactions finally landed him in an Australian jail. Five years after his reported death, she married her second husband. But Mr. Pim says he has just come from Australia on the same boat with her first. George is horrorstruck. His love for Olivia is solid and settled, but his fear of the Law and the County is stronger. Things look bad for Olivia. Mr. Pim is recalled by an irate and agitated family council, and pressed for further particulars. Says he: "Why, the man died at Marseilles, I thought I told you about his getting a fishbone stuck in his throat; that was the whole point of the story." This clears the situation a little, but not enough: George and Olivia have been living in sin for nearly five years! At the end of this harrowing day, however, Mr. Pim reappears once more, whispers to Olivia that now he remembers the man's right name, it was not her husband at all.

Author Alan Alexander Milne, 48, poet, playwright, humorist, is principally famed for his verses and stories for children, especially for one book of verses, When We Were Very Young. He says he has written his last children's story. Before the War an editor of Punch, after his four years in the Royal Warwickshires he decided to freelance, try his hand at plays. The Dover Road and Mr. Pim Passes By were his most successful. Author Milne has never been in the U. S. Slim, fair, he has "one wife, one son, one house, one recreation--golf." He smokes a pipe. He is tired of being known as "whimsical." Other books: The Red House Mystery, The Day's Play, The Holiday Round, Wirmie-the-Pooh, Now We Are Six, The House at Pooh Corner.

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