_The Florentine Dagger._ By BEN HECHT. (Boni & Liveright.)
Ben Hecht is mountebank of words par excellence: their swirling shapes,
their sounds, their shifting colors, as he juggles them so adroitly
before our bewildered eyes. The subject-matter of his books serves only
as a pattern, an excuse for weaving a tapestry of fascinating and often
amazing phrases. Whether it is a psychological study in the manner of
Dreiser, like Gargoyles, or an all-night detective story, like the
present book, is an altogether incidental matter. It is the words that
count. That may perhaps explain why Mr. Hecht should suddenly decide to
perform before such a bourgeois audience, descending, so to speak, from
the Palace to the four-a-day. He evidently realized that the world was
quite bored by anything he had to say, but perfectly entranced by the
way in which he said it.
_The Florentine Dagger_ was written with Prof. Hart’s Psychology of
Insanity on one hand and the Memoirs of the de Medici Family on the
other. Taken as a dramatic presentation of certain psychological
phenomena it is brilliant enough to make itself endeared by every
psychology professor in the country. Everyone in the book, from the
last member of the fastidious de Medicis to the old actress, is
troubled by complexes and obsessions of all sorts, so that a miserable
and uncertain rôle is assigned to each. All the time-dishonored devices
of the mystery story are faithfully observed, although its technique on
the whole is genuinely successful.
Mr. Hecht has in this book, as in all his others, displayed his
incredible faculty for choosing a new literary technique as casually as
most writers choose their stationery.