Review of The Rainbow Feather

28 Aug 2019 - Courtney Floyd

Published in The Saturday Review (4 Feb. 1899)

The man who has won a measure of popularity in an art by performances that merit no consideration is customarily dismissed beyond the reach of praise or blame by the declaration that ‘he knows his business.’ One would willingly apply this convenient and graceful formula to Mr. Fergus Hume if only his ‘Rainbow Feather’ were not so remarkably the work of a man who does not know his business––the business, namely, of engrossing his readers in the search for the perpetrator of a crime. From chapter 5 to chapter 24 the author is engaged in clearing an endless succession of persons who did not murder Milly in chapter 4. The evidence on which they are suspected is not cleverly invented or clevery set aside; indeed Mr. Fergus Hume has so contrived to hold off his reader that all or none of the persons suspected might be hanged, or not, without causing the shadow of an emotion. In the course of these chapters we arrive at much that is far-fetched, but nothing that suprises.