AustLit

Humorous domestic tale of a picnic given by a married couple on a searing summer's day, blessed by mosquitoes, a snake, a fall into a ravine, and a storm. The desired result - a proposal, and a very enjoyable evening sheltering at a farmhouse sweeten the disaster however. (PB)

A gawky youth has the last laugh on a smart touring cyclist. Humour. (PB)

Deceptively conventional romance of an English village where the local parson becomes engaged only to discover on his wedding day that her invalid mother is in fact 'Basher Bill' the burglar. Ironic and lightly satirical; includes passing comments on women, marriage etc. Interesting and light. (PB)

Successful card swindle played upon high-living London gentleman's club members. Double-cross between the swindlers completes the negotiations. (PB)

Slight, melodramatic romance set in France and the USA. An American girl learns singing in Paris and is fallen in love with by Count Paul de Frontin. Determined to succeed as a singer and support her father she refuses to marry him - until on her second debut she fails publicly, appearing drunk. She agrees to marry the count but he is killed before they leave for America in a riding accident. She returns to New York and becomes a nun! (PB)

Humorous romance. An army captain is nearly prevented from ever seeing his ideal, Miss Bracegirdle, by an officious maid who mistakes him for an umbrella thief. Only Mrs Bracegirdle's discovery of the misunderstanding averts a final separation. Slight. (PB)

Plot and counterplot between two English cousins competing for their miserly old uncle's wealth. In the end Eliza's schemes ensure she receives the inheritance and Conrad is penniless. Intricate and unprincipled double-dealing. Slight. (PB)

Tragedy of the French sculptor of the 1830s Borsa, prompted by the angry angel on his grave. Marrying early he began drinking, deserted his wife and child for an English patroness, and forgot them in success. He turned his wife from his door but stricken blind conceived remorse and sculpted The Angel of Vengeance in his blindess and despair. He died in his wife's arms. Interesting tale, competently told. (PB)

On the costs, inconveniences and rewards of fatherhood. (PB)

American romance of unorthodox development in 1884. A Philadelphia gentleman answers a lady's advertisement for a cultured correspondent censoriously but is drawn in, and eventually gains her consent to meeting him. It is arranged through her cousin in Atlantic City on the condition that the correspondence is never mentioned. Only when he proposes do they discover they have been victim's of her cousin's - and fiancee's - practical joke. The joke loses the cousin his fiancee - who marries her supposed correspondent. Change of lovers a little hurried but tale otherwise neat, light and breezy. Usual pleasant style tale though plot varied a bit. (PB)

In Florence in the 16th century, the notorious swordsmen Jacopo Belloni is killed by a slight youth - James Crichton - the Admirable Crichton! - from Scotland. The deed is done to rid the world of a killer!! Superhero tale. (PB)

Escape from thieves in 1849 in the Blue Ridge mountains of Eastern Kentucky. A traveller and his negro servant comfort a band of robbers in league with the landlord of their inn, repulse their attack and escape. Action tale. (PB)

Lawyer and criminal in London; humour. London Q.C's reminiscences of his early days of limited income and the kindness of a stranger in paying an oyster bar bill when he had left his money at home. Twenty years later he defends the man from a charge of passing fraudulent money - and learns he had helped him to do so twenty years before. Light; after dinner tale. (PB)

Hobart wharf in a summer in the 1880s, and a newly-married man is rescued from drowning by a half-witted rouseabout. Further, he sacrifices himself to a shark to save the groom whose mother had been kind to his family. Simple account. (PB)

A farmhand Joe Scorer is the prime suspect in the murder of handsome James Dennon, engaged to Joe's employer Catherine Empsy he refuses to marry her when she falls pregnant, courting Bessie Shannahand; younger, prettier and richer. Catherine's uncle is also suspected but it takes a clever swagman - a Melbourne detective - to find the murderer in half-witted, dirty Milly Moider ... (PB)

Romantic tragedy set in France and England. A governess bids goodbye to her fiancee, an artist, for the last time as she returns to teach in England. Their savings and plans for marriage are destroyed when she is killed in a terrible train accident ... His painting of her is all he retains - though fame comes too. Slight; on tragedy of life. (PB)

Mutiny disguised but discovered in the Pacific Ocean. A message in a bottle gives details of a mutiny aboard a nearby ship but a chase and boarding of the vessel by a naval war-sloop indicates all is well: the captain, his wife and baby all greeting the boarding party. A finger cut off and caught near a chain plate rouses suspicion - and eventually the captain and his wife are discovered bound below decks, the apparent wife actually a disguised Spanish half-breed ... Action tale; suspense well sustained. (PB)

Grieving grandmother and a newspaper editor. Probably US. A grandmother's humble but unsuccessful request to an editor to print a poetic tribute to her grandson recently dead of scarlet fever. Pathos. (PB)

The engagement broken through a woman's idle caprice that her lover should enter a lion's cage. Set in France, in Paris and St Cloud. Very slight. (PB)

Humorous account of an afternoon's misadventures on a tandem bicycle in the streets of Hammersmith near London. Mentions the London office of the Detroit Free Press. (PB)