TWENTIETH CENTURY CRIMES. By Frederick A Mackenzie Little, Brown, and Co., Boston 1927, $3.00.

HERE is a series of tales unfolded which are guaranteed to keep you from play, or from the chimney corner, respectively, and as the case may be.

If you enjoy exploring among the yellowed pages of the Newgate Calendar; if you enjoy paying your quarter to see the waxen images of Mrs. Snyder, and the Chicago barber who went mad with his razor in his hand; if you enjoy following the dotted lines in the "Daily Mirror" diagram photographs to find the "X", marketing sport where murder was committed:--in short, if you have hankerings after homicide, you will find much in this collection of twentieth century crimes to quicken up your blood.

Beginning with the murder of Bobby Franks by Leopold and Loeb, ending with the case of Henri Landru, the Parisian Bluebeard, the beok deals, by the way, with the murder of Rasputin, the assassination of the Romanoffs at Ekaterinburg, the case of Steinie Morison, the Stockholm Dynamite Murder, and the Rosenthal murder in New York.

Mr. Mackenzie is a newspaper man. His stories smack of the copy desk, and have all the snap of a star reporter. But their present appearance in book form makes possible, in addition, a more finished and artistic treatment than is allowed by the exigencies of a first edition. There is included a wealth of descriptive and dramatic detail,--excerpts from psychiatrists' reports, selections from letters, transcripts from diaries, bits of testimony,--worked in with the essential facts of each crime. And so skillfully is it done that the imaginings of a Conan Doyle or an Arthur Train seem like poor, pale stuff in comparison.

Each exciting episode is filled with the madness, badness, and sadness in the lives of men who have lived intensely, who have drunk life to the lees. And the account of those lives is none the less interesting because they were lived in our own times, and under circumstances which are familiar to all of us.