Talk:The Mad Busman, and Other Stories

Reviews

 * The Bookman, Oct 1926: Whimsical short stories in the manner of Miss Wylie's earlier work.


 * The Saturday Review of Literature, 25 Sept 1926: This book is a collection of short stories from which a few stand out as having integrity of purpose, while the rest, although all are excellently written, show Miss Wylie once more making peace with the happy ending. This tendency reaches its height in "Pas de Quatre" where the author outdoes her usual marital adjustments for two by juggling with four characters, criss-crossing their loves for a time and then (even snatching one from the jaws of death for the purpose) straightening everything out for the finale of "a man burgling his own house with the front door wide open, laying infatuated siege to his own wife." But it is ungracious to dwell upon such details with "Little Fraülein and the Big World" still to be discussed. It deals with a few weeks in the life of a tiny starveling, caught and crushed between the hatreds of two countries. In this story Miss Wiley touches reality. Little can be said of it because its value is organic: its nerves and muscles cannot be dissected; it must be taken as a whole, it must be read. The title story itself is a whimsical yarn of a man who drives a motor bus named Gwendoline with whom he finally elopes. It will amuse anyone, and could only have come from an English pen, which is to say, you are bound to think of Dickens in reading it. "The Wonderful Story" comes near to being a bit of sheer realism; three creatures of the earth move through it darkly to a final light; it is marred, however, by running on after it is obviously finished and through being told through a third person—when the material is such that it should come raw from the author to the reader. The other stories in the volume are of the calibre of good magazine fiction plus the Wylie watermark of distinction.