["The Galantrys"] is the biography of a certain James Galantry, half gipsy and half gentleman, and it is also the story of a changing society, the period in English life when the established order of the eighteenth century was giving way to modern industrialism. But although Mrs. Carter, like so many of the English detective-story writers, is notably well-educated—and not ashamed of it—and despite the fact that in her hero's struggles to cope with his complicated heredity she had the material for a perfectly plausible psychological study, her novel sacrifices the realities of both fiction and social history to a quite eccentric interest in genetics. She is obsessed with the science of breeding; drawing most of her lessons from animal mating, she seems to regard all human character, not only James Galantry's, as if it were as susceptible to hereditary determination as the character of a...