Life, 1915-02-25 · page 28 of 44
Life — February 25, 1915 — page 28: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
The top cartoon depicts welcoming dignitaries greeting demonic or supernatural figures—likely satirizing public enthusiasm for occult literature and spiritualism. The illustration mocks the fashionable fascination with the "super-normal" mentioned in the text below. The review criticizes author Sax Rohmer for failing to deliver on the promise of connecting ancient mysteries to modern occultism in an intellectually coherent way. The text laments that Rohmer merely presents disconnected historical fragments without psychological or thematic unity. The lower cartoon shows a woman and man in what appears to be a cave setting, captioned "STEADY, PLEASE, WE COULDN'T HAVE A BETTER BACKGROUND"—humorously suggesting that primitive/ancient settings have romantic appeal. The page concludes with a book review of "The Adventures of Detective Barney," questioning whether it plagiarizes an earlier dime-novel detective story, while admitting the new version is entertaining enough.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
A COMMITTEE OF WELCOME ling and ghoulishly imaginative as Sax Rohmer, would scem‘ (especially as the author in his preface announces himself as an initiate writing for the enlightenment of the layman) to promise us something quite other than disconnected dip- pings into musty records. Our modern world is once more, with growing seriousness, enviss the problems of the occult and the super-normal. And we are more than ready to be led to an intelligent realization of the very real con- tinuity that exi: tween our own gropings amid. these mysteries and those of the ancients, But Mr. Rohmer not only fails to bring out the psychology of this continuity. but docs not even fuse his archcological fragments into any glow ing unity—romantic or other—of his own. REMEMBER, forty years ago or so, lying hidden in a cave which the cow had caten in the side of the haystack, and reading a novel (published at a dime) whose author I've forgotten, but the name of which was “Somebody or other, the Boy Detective". Is it possible that Harvey J. O'Higgins sa plagiarist? Or are “The Adventures of Detective Barney (Century, $1.30) a case of two great minds working inde pendently on parallel lines? This much at least is certain. That these seven stories of Baruey—he is the same sassy East Side messenger-boy-turned-slevth who was the hero of “The Dummy are good enough fun to make one feel like History: STEADY, PLEASE, WE COULDN'T HAVE A BETTER a cave-dweller again. J. B. Kerfoot. BACKGROUND comichooks.gelm