Arlenquinade

THE FLYING DUTCHMAN--Michael Arlen--Doubleday, Doran ($2).

Green hats "pour le sport and bravely worn" have long since lost their style. But Michael Arlen, who alters the cut of his books at fashion's wink, still has millinery for a stock in trade. "The hats many women wear, even poor women who ought to know better," remarks Johnnie Cloud, narrator of The Flying Dutchman, "are uniformly ugly and idiotic, which is maybe quite natural since, so it's said, fashions for women are made by homosexuals and Lesbians and they don't like women to look attractive to men."

Johnnie, a U. S. aeronautical expert who in typical Arlen fashion is also the Comte de Saint-Cloud, tells a tale of high adventure in a style which intermittently suggests Ouida, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, E. Phillips Oppenheim and P. G. Wodehouse. Between fashionable adulteries unrolls the story of Johnnie's employer, Chance Winter, an Englishman with world-wide armament connections which he uses to promote the subversive ends of an international secret organization. Suave and ruthless, Winter eventually meets an appropriate fate.

Author Arlen, still a fashion plate at 43, is now in Greece with his wife, the Countess Atalanta Mercati, who is as beautiful as her name, and their two children. Nowadays his highest ambition is "to write a book which I can read after I'm fifty without nausea." The Flying Dutchman, pure Arlenquinade, is not it.

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