British Bad Girl

MR. AND MRS. PENNINGTON--Francis Brett Young--Harper ($2.50). Though Author Young might be horrified at the comparison, Mr. and Mrs. Pennington may remind you of Authoress Vina Delmar's best-selling Bad Girl. Like Bad Girl, it is a circumstantial story of middle-class domesticity, its falls and rises. But Author Young, Bachelor of Medicine, has not been so obstetrical as Authoress Delmar, mother. His scene too is larger, peopled by more characters. Whereas Bad Girl was a tempest in a flat, Mr. and Mrs. Pennington is heading straight for tragedy when Author Young's magic wand stops it, just in time.

Susan was an orphan, living with her respectable but impoverished uncle and aunt. She was pretty, had imbibed some principles, evolved no real convictions. When she met Dick Pennington, an ordinary, decent, motor-bike-riding young clerk who had been to a third-rate "public school" (U. S.: private), their attraction was mutual and sudden. They married, on very little a week, soon moved into a jerrybuilt bungalow they could not really afford. Then things began to happen. Susan, to her dismay, found she was going to have a baby. Dick lost his job. Payments on the furniture, the rent, were overdue. The baby was born prematurely, stillborn. Then Manufacturer Bulgin, villain in tycoon's clothing, an unsuccessful suitor for Susan's hand, rescued them by giving Dick a job but put Susan in a dangerous spot by sending him to a distant factory and keeping him there. Susan successfully repulsed Villain Bulgin's ponderous advances but gradually fell a victim to a rich young Jew, Harry Levison. Bulgin discovered her secret, vengefully wrote an anonymous letter to Dick which brought him racing home. Susan admitted everything; Dick rushed off to kill Levison. He saw Levison's father instead. A few minutes after he had left, old Levison was discovered dead on his office floor. Dick was arrested for murder. Everything looked very black indeed and Dick might have swung for it had not the British sense of justice, ably abetted by Author Young, rescued our hero from an undeserved fate. The Author, Francis Brett Young. 47, even more versatile than William McFee. is a novelist-musician-doctor. He practiced literature and medicine simultaneously, for a long time was more successful in diagnosing private ailments than the public taste. During the War he worked hard in the Royal Army Medical Corps, was invalided back from East Africa a 60% disability from malaria. After the Armistice he and his wife went to live on Capri, still spend most of their time there. A pianist (his wife is a concert singer), Author Young also composes, has written music for the Songs of Robert Bridges. Mild-mannered, quiet, spare, with a pipe usually in position above an unaggressive chin, Francis Brett Young looks his part: a quite successful, quite good English author. Other books: The Crescent Moon, My Brother Jonathan, The Redlakes.

Mr. and Mrs. Pennington is the January choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club.

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