Run!

Over the years I have read all of Patricia Wentworth's wonderfully simple and entertaining books. Never read one that bored or that I haven't read over and over again. I am in the process of re-collecting all her work.

This isn't a Maud Silver novel; _Run!_ was first published in 1938, just after that long gap in the Silver series between _Grey Mask_ (1928) and the 2nd Silver novel (1937) , wherein Wentworth's command of her craft, polished by the intervening non-Silver books, improved to the standard that held through the rest of her life. This particular book is a very good story with a lot of humor, more adventure and suspense than puzzle-solving.James Elliot, with no sisters but 14 girl cousins, flatters himself that he knows a lot about girls, especially their general untruthfulness. (He's even almost as clever as he thinks he is.) But when he gets lost driving down back country roads through fog and stops to ask directions, the girl who dashes out of the unknown house saying only, "Run!" followed by pot-shots out of the fog, seems to raise the standards of bare-faced lying to new heights. (Giving a false name to a stranger when you're both hiding in a hayloft is one thing, but 'Aspidistra Aspinall'?) She's exasperating, but has real mettle in a crisis, so when he runs into her again at his cousin Daphne's, he's not about to accept a brush-off. (He's so obstinate that "the Great War", to him, isn't the little dust-up of 1914-1918, but the big family quarrel with his father the Colonel over whether he would enter the Army.)Sally West, as she turns out to be, is the sister of Jocko West, an old schoolmate of James' - and while the name she gave him at first was false, a lot of the rest of her story seems to be true. Her guardian really *is* the famous author Ambrose Sylvester, he of the perfect profile, writer's block, and sinister-looking wife. The Wests really *did* have an aunt Clementa (although James refuses to believe in any fanciful tales of family jewels until he sees them). And the last thing he refuses to believe is that Sally could be almost engaged to anyone else, let alone one of Sylvester's dubious in-laws...