Books: Dartmoor Macbeth

BRED IN THE BONE—Eden Phillpotts—Macmillan ($2).

As far and few as the Jumblies' habitat are detective stories about human beings. Writers of detectifiction are not usually able characterizers, and vice versa; it is too hard to do, gives unnecessarily much for the money. Oldster Eden Phillpotts has made a sturdy attempt. With an old-fashioned dignity and dialectal fidelity reminiscent of the late great Thomas Hardy, he tells a gruesome tale that may remind more than one reader of its prototype, Macbeth. Character is Destiny, Author Phillpotts believes. On this text he is writing a three-decker novel, of which Bred in the Bone is the first part.

Scene is the blasted heath of Phillpotts' beloved Dartmoor. Lady Macbeth is Avis Ullathorne, a strapping country wench with a shrewd mind, nerves of steel. Macbeth is Peter Bryden, a fine upstanding man to look at but with a fatal flaw in him called conscience. Duncan is his older brother, owner of North Wood Farm and affianced to Avis. When Scotland Yard's Detective Midwinter arrives on the scene the murder has been done, the corpse hidden, all clues covered. Midwinter rightly suspects Peter and Avis but can find no evidence. Instead he sets traps. Burly Peter might have blundered, but Avis reads Midwinter like a hornbook, makes game of all his plotting work. Making no headway, the detective returns to London. Now Avis and Peter are married, they have the farm they want, the baby they also wanted is on the way. But Peter broods, his mind goes slowly maggoty with remorse. When the ghost of his brother returns to the farm he knows his time is short. Avis, who can minister to everything but a mind diseased, finally gives up, lets him arrange his suicide. Says Peter: "A man's but human. A woman can rise above being human seemingly; but I never met the man that could." One morning he is found dead in a hedge; a twig might have pulled his shotgun's trigger. Avis bears up, has her baby, goes on being dauntless. To Midwinter, on vacation this time, she has the nerve to tell the whole story, guessing he will let bygones be. How her infant son will turn out, hints Author Phillpotts, will be set forth in the next instalment.