Page:O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories for 1919.pdf/17

Rh The Committee accepted style as the fit medium for conveying the matter.

Since the Committee confess to catholicity of taste, the chosen stories reveal predilection for no one They like detective stories, and particularly those of Melville Davisson Post. A follower of the founder of this school of fiction, he has none the less advanced beyond his master and has discovered other ways than those of the Rue Morgue. “Five Thousand Dollars Reward” in its brisk action, strong suspense, and humorous denouement carries on the technique so neatly achieved in “The Doomdorf Mystery” and other tales about Uncle Abner.

The Committee value, also, the story about animals: universal interest in puzzles, in the science of ratiocination, is not more pronounced than the interest in rationalizing the brute. “The Mottled Slayer” and “The Elephant Remembers” offer sympathetic studies of struggles in the animal world. Mr. Marshall’s white elephant will linger as a memory, even as his ghost remains, longer than the sagacious play-fellow of Mr. Gilbert’s little Indian; but nobody can forget the battle the latter fought with the python.

For stories about the home the Committee have a weakness: Miss Ferber’s “April Twenty-fifth As Usual,” cheerfully proclaiming the inevitableness of spring cleaning, might be published with the sub-title, An Epic of the Housekeeper.

They were alert for reflections of life—in America and elsewhere. The politics of “Gum Shoes, 4-B”; the local court of law in “Tom Belcher’s Store”; the frozen west of “Turkey Red” seemed to them to meet the demand that art must hold the mirror up to nature.

In particular, the Committee hoped to find good stories of the war. Now that fiction containing anything of the Great Struggle is anathema to editors, and must wait for that indefinite time of its revival, it was like getting a last bargain to read “Facing It,” “Humoresque,” “Contact,” “Autumn Crocuses,” and “England to America.” In these small masterpieces is celebrated either manhood which keeps a rendezvous with death,