THE GINGER CAT. BY Christopher Reeve. William Morrow & Co. New York, 1929, $2.00,

"THE GINGER CAT" is a mystery story, or rather it professes to be a mystery story. It contains all the factors necessary for any kind of novel one could want to write. Mr. Reeve decided to write a melodramatic mystery story.

In the way of characters (none of which all very well developed), the author has two coldblooded respectable villains, a distinguished authoress, a pure, untainted heroine, a weak-willed mother, a detective, a hero in the form of a nephew of the authoress, and a few minor personages playing lesser parts. In the way of situations, Mr. Reeve has an equally wide variety, none of them wholly credible or real.

Despite unwieldy complications, the plot is not a bad one for a melodrama. One has to understand (and stand for) certain conventions in the best of bloody melodramas. The locale is a little town in England, in the dusty shadows of the cathedral close. It is a good stage for a mystery, though one might accuse Mr. Reeve of overdoing the underground passage and hidden chapels a bit for his effect. The story moves swiftly enough, although it might have been better-handled.

"The Ginger Cat" is an outstanding example of a certain type of mystery and melodrama writing that is very popular at the present time. It ignores one of the principles of good melodrama--that the reader's attention should never be distracted from the main story and the main characters, unless for some point essential to the development of the story. Of the actual writing, the reader should be always unconscious. The English language should not be slaughtered to such a degree that it becomes irritating, nor should the style be toned up to such a degree that it becomes noticeable. It is all very well to develop a background that will help the whole atmosphere of the tale, but it is a mistake to make the background too prominent. It has the same effect of the announcement interrupting a radio program to advertise whosis' blue-white diamonds. S. S. Vine Dine makes his hero, Philo Vance, in the Greene and Canary Murder Cases say and do a lot of idiotic things in an attempt to give his story an intellectual and cultural background.

No one reads melodramas for education. They are meant to entertain one. And, in the final analysis, "The Ginger Cat," despite its faults, was read through to the finish merely because it entertained this reviewer.