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The Madness of May, by Meredith Nicholson, is very, very silly. But maybe not quite silly enough. Coincidence piles on coincidence, and most of the characters have given themselves up to the profession of ridiculousness, and Nicholson manages to have it all hang together pretty well, but…I don’t know. I’m going to tell you about it and you’re going to think it sounds awesome, but there’s something lacking. The nonsense isn’t infectious. The Madness of May should be magic, and it’s just not.

Billy Deering has just lost a whole pile of bonds he embezzled from his dad’s company and is kind of in a snit about it when he arrives home to be told by the butler that his friend Mr. Hood has come to stay. Billy doesn’t know any Mr. Hood, and he’s afraid his visitor is a detective or something, come to arrest him, but it turns out that R. Hood (Robin, obviously) is a tanned and and shabby (but somehow distinguished) gentleman who has come to take Billy on an adventure. He’s full of stories about consorting with crooks of various kinds, is probably being followed by detectives, and travels with a chauffeur he calls Cassowary and who he claims is a millionaire who can’t be trusted with his own money.

They set out in search of the girl who accidentally took Billy’s suitcase instead of her own at Grand Central, and promptly run into a) a girl in a clown costume dancing in the moonlight and calling herself Pierette, b) a girl calling herself Babette and wearing a maid’s costume who clearly isn’t a maid, and c) the suitcase full of bonds. Further along, they find d) an elderly gentleman calling himself Pantaloon and e) his middle-aged but attractive daughter, Columbine. Also f) Billy’s sister, who is not in California where she’s supposed to be, and g) Billy’s father, who’s in jail. Most of these people have things to say about a novel, also called The Madness of May, that, from the characters’ reactions to it, is probably better than this book. Eventually everyone except Pantaloon and Billy’s dad get paired off.

Hood and characters a), b), d) and e) are, throughout, theoretically spouting nonsense. Actually, though, it’s not as nonsensical as they think it is, and they vary it by berating Billy for not joining them in their whimsy. Of course, most of the crazy things that happen to Billy turn out to be orchestrated, but just how orchestrated they are might surprise you. Probably nothing else will, except maybe that Billy doesn’t know who William Blake is.

I know I say this all the time, but I didn’t dislike this book as much as it sounds like I did. I just found it uninspired and unconvincing on a small scale. Before I started writing about books on a regular basis, I didn’t really understand what people meant when they said writers should show, not tell. I think I get it now: you can’t just say, “everyone had a great time,” because even if a reader is perfectly happy to believe you, they’re not going to really feel like everyone had a good time unless you show them. You can’t just say that jokes are funny; they have to actually be funny. No matter how much you suspend disbelief, if there’s no supporting evidence for what the author is telling you, you’re going to feel dissatisfied. That’s how I felt after reading The Madness of May, and that’s how I felt after reading Nicholson’s A Reversible Santa Claus.

The Main Chance is one of those business-and-ethics-and-someone-has-a-pretty-daughter stories, brought to you by the author of House of a Thousand Candles. It centers on three young men and the fairly new midwestern town of Clarkson.

John Saxton is the newcomer. He’s from Boston, has never proved himself to be particularly good at anything, and failed at running a ranch in Wyoming before some friends found him a job overseeing the Western interests of an Eastern financial company.

Then there’s Warrick Raridan, born and bred in Clarkson. He’s cultured and charming and sort of the town’s only dilletante. He has a law degree, but has trouble sticking with a legal career, or with anything else. He and Saxton quickly become close friends.

James Wheaton is the one who pulled himself up by his bootstraps, but while being steady and honest has landed him in his position as cashier of the Clarkson bank, it hasn’t done much else. he’s dull to talk to and doesn’t know how to deal with social situations at all.

Saxton is theoretically the protagonist, and the book begins and ends with him, but the middle spends more time on the other two. Which makes sense: while Saxton is slowly and carefully getting the affairs of the Neponset Trust in order and enjoying his friendship with Warry Raridan, the others are having Drama. Wheaton is learning how to be a person that interacts with other people and dealing with the occasional reappearance of his unfortunately not long-lost convict brother. Warry is trying to reform himself for the benefit of his old friend Evelyn Porter, who has only friendly feelings for him, although everyone in town insists on coupling their names romantically.

And then…I find that I don’t really want to give anything away. It took me a long time to get into The Main Chance, because it was kind of unfocused at the start, and not much was happening, but once I readjusted my expectations — away from House of a Thousand Candles and vaguely in the direction of V.V.’s Eyes — I couldn’t put it down. It wasn’t the need to find out what happens, or to confirm my suspicion that a certain character was completely and utterly doomed, although those certainly helped. Mostly I just wanted to find out how everyone was going to resolve their personal inner turmoil. And also, later, to appreciate John Saxton being awesome.

Saxton doing that thing where a character finally lands in the appropriate position for their talents to be properly appreciated was a late highlight. So was a stocks-and-bonds-and-machinations mess involving public transportation that was gripping and involved until Nicholson decided to wrap it up much too quickly. What kept me reading until those things appeared on the horizon was the incredible grounding detail. Wheaton’s total lack of social skills was not only realistic but totally gutting, except in comparison to the passage where he goes to the fashionable church and Bishop Delafield’s sermon hits him so hard where he lives that he literally can’t listen to it, or understand why.

Next best, in kind of the opposite direction, was Saxton’s genuine, diffident kindness. When do protagonists of early 20th century novels get to be likable and self-effacing and hard to get out of their shells? Usually they’re darkly humorous and a little bit masterful or good-natured and outgoing and a little bit masterful. Saxton, is, I suppose, also a little bit masterful, but only professionally. And he’s embarrassed about it. I like him a lot, and Evelyn Porter, too, who is tarred with a similar brush. A contemporary reviewer found her to be too ordinary, and I agree, but I think it’s a good thing.

You may be getting the impression that this book is really wonderful. That impression would be, I’m pretty sure, mistaken. But parts of it are amazing.

I didn’t love A Reversible Santa Claus, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it. I can’t think of anything I wanted from it that I didn’t get, anyway.

It’s by Meredith Nicholson, author of the excellent House of a Thousand Candles, and it’s got a pretty good setup: a former thief known as Billy the Hopper — for the ease with which he’s always made his escapes — has retired with one last haul and settled down on a chicken farm with his wife, Mary, and another former thief, Humpy. Mary used to be a pickpocket. Humpy used to raise chickens in jail, so he’s got valuable experience. All three of them are glad to be living a quiet life within the law, but one day the Hopper sees a wallet sticking out of someone’s jacket on the train and is unable to resist pocketing it. This sets in motion a chain of events that results in the Hopper accidentally kidnapping a toddler.

From the point when the Hopper steals the wallet, through the accidental kidnapping and well into the middle of the story, he seems set on making things worse for himself and it’s a little uncomfortable to read. It doesn’t help that Mary and Humpy are so hostile to him. Things shift into a smoother gear when he tries to return the kidnapped child and ends up being sent on a supremely ridiculous quest. Everything goes a little more slapstick, and a lot more easily, from that point on — maybe too much so, as the various difficulties the Hopper still faces turn out to be implausibly easy to deal with. Still, it’s reassuring after the nerve-wracking beginning, so I didn’t really mind.

That’s the case with most of The Reversible Santa Claus‘ imperfections: there are things wrong with it, I guess; they just don’t seem like problems. This story has all the Christmas story things — a cute kid, a slightly beleaguered young couple, a reformed criminal, two vaguely Scrooge-like individuals, and themes of forgiveness and people being totally ridiculous. And when you take a closer look, none of it makes much sense, but the whole thing proceeds so smoothly and pleasantly that it’s hard to care. I don’t think this is going to be anyone’s favorite Christmas story, because Nicholson doesn’t try too hard with the emotional stuff — probably for the best — but it’s more than adequate.

Circumstances conspired to make me compare The House of a Thousand Candles to The Circular Staircase. First, I started reading them at the same time–the Rinehart on my Kindle, the Nicholson on my phone. Then, when I googled Meredith Nicholson, I came up with an article on Michael Grost’s Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection that explicitly compared the two. So most of the time that I was reading the Nicholson book, I was thinking about Rinehart. And I was expecting Nicholson to compare pretty badly.

The thing I’ve always said about Mary Roberts Rinehart–at least to myself–is that her best quality is her sense of humor. And apparently Rinehart agreed, saying that the problem with her competitors was a lack of humor. Mike Grost offers The House of a Thousand Candles as an example of those humorless competitors, but I think he’s being a little unfair. I can think of much worse offenders. Anna Katherine Green, for one. But because of Grost’s piece, I was expecting House of a Thousand Candles to be pretty bad, so I ended up being pleasantly surprised–and that’s not a bad thing to be.

Our hero is John Glenarm, and in a lot of ways he’s typical of mstery/adventure novels from this era–sort of in the Grenfell Lorry mode, you know? Upper middle class, trained to a profession, brave and honorable and equally at home in a gunfight or a lady’s parlor. Unlike Lorry, though, Jack Glenarm does not appear to think that the world revolves around him. This is, to say the least, a quality I value in narrators. Jack is mostly pretty likeable, actually. And I love his relationship with his dead grandfather–how determined Jack is to carry out his wishes, and how Nicholson shows us how much alike they are without making Jack conscious of it. Too often first-person narration only tells you things that the narrator is aware of, but Nicholson has been cleverer than that.

Jack’s profession is engineering, and this story would not be taking place at all if he had chosen architecture instead. His grandfather, John Marshall Glenarm, is a little bit obsessed with architecture–and by a little, I mean a lot–and wanted Jack to study it too, but Jack decided to travel around the world with his disreputable friend Larry Donovan and burn through the fortune his father left him instead. That takes him about three years.

Then he gets a notification from Arthur Pickering, his grandfather’s lawyer/protege, who Jack has detested since they were at school together: John Marshall Glenarm is dead, and while Jack has inherited his property, there are some conditions attached. The main one is that Jack must go to Annandale, his grandfather’s half-finished estate in Indiana, and stay there for a year. Otherwise the property goes to Marian Devereaux, the niece of the Protestant nun who runs a girls’ school on an adjacent piece of land. One of the other conditions is that Jack can’t marry her. And one more thing: John Marshall Glenarm’s estate is considerable poorer than expected, and Jack suspects Pickering of some kind of wrongdoing. So does Larry, who appears unexpectedly in New York, on the run from the law after, I don’t know, killing somebody in Ireland, I think.

Annandale is pretty weird. Half the rooms aren’t habitable, but there’s a gigantic library full of books on architecture, and it’s lit entirely by candles. Also a dungeon, which John Marshall Glenarm’s servant, Bates, uses to store potatoes.

Bates is also