Books

Melvin Levy has written an absorbing and full-bodied novel about the growth of an American city and of a small group of men who get theirs during the process of growth and development and chiefly of one Mark Merre, born of a Galician shoemaker. The book is entitled “The Last Pioneers” and is published by Alfred H. King.

The city of the book is called Puget and Puget sounds like Seattle, but before we come to Seattle, in its dubious “pioneer” beginnings we have accompanied Shemanski-Merre on a modern Villonesque Odyssey which will undoubtedly make some good people shudder at men’s capacity in these days for shady living. But all this is but an exciting hors d’oeuvre for the plat du jour, the story of Puget-Seattle, the story of its organized vice and corruption, the story of how Merre and Dexter, the Harvard roughneck who became Puget’s banker and trolley magnate, and Mick Delea, ‘the “Prostitute’s Defender,” played with the politics and the resources of a community and thrived on it in various ways-all except for Mick, who was bad in such an honest way that he didn’t know enough to come out of the rain.

Mr. Levy has a first-rate capacity for using social and political data to enrich his narrative of individuals without letting any of this data block the strong flood of his narrative. He has also greater resources than we suspected of keeping his own social point of view implicit, if not actually concealed, while he moves ahead with his exciting yarn. We are however left free to draw our own conclusions as to the stuff from which “pioneers” are made. H. S.