SOURCE: “Some Novels of the Month,” in The Bookman, New York, Vol. 40, February, 1915, pp. 676-77.

In the following review, Cooper praises the wealth of cultural and sociological information found in Sinister Street.

Arnold Bennett recently wrote, “the older I grow, the less attention I pay to technique in fiction.” The same words might apply to a majority of the younger English novelists who have come into vogue within the last decade, and among others, to Ian Hay. To this younger school, the essential thing is not a certain closely correlated series of events, uniting to make a strongly constructed drama. Events, of course, there must be, or there could be no narrative; but to these later craftsmen the essential is first, last and all the time human character, and events are interesting, not in themselves, but because of the way in which they cause certain given characters and...