SOURCE: "A Touch of Madness," in The New York Times Book Review, January 23, 1944, p. 6.

Below, Farber presents a favorable review of The Touch of Nutmeg.

Clifton Fadiman is to be congratulated on his premonition that "one of the things this sad world needs" is a new collection of Collier stories. For in Mr. Collier's fantasy world of devils, murderers and angels there is a strictly ordered justice. The murderer is not always caught, I must admit (unless he happens also to be a genteel sadist with a habit of rearranging people's lives), but the immoral—the dishonest, the unkind, the pushers and devourers of others—these are always punished, and sometimes very ingeniously.

Like his countryman Saki, Mr. Collier achieves his moral ends by a neat blending of humor and horror, an equally immaculate style and a dramatist's sense of when to stop. Even in his more exuberant...