In this book the reader is furnished passage in a liner of the British Malaya Steamship Company from Shanghai to London, and all the way back again, Suez Canal, Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and all. He is privileged to sit at the table of the ship's surgeon, Doctor Scarlett, to be served by the incomparable steward Blaise, and to observe as various a group of passengers involved in as curious an assortment of mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual complications as are likely to be found on any liner of 28,000 tons on any of the seas.

Doctor Scarlett undertakes to resolve the assorted troubles. A benevolent lago, his ingenuity and understanding are worthy of the permanent record now accorded them, though his occasionally unorthodox methods shouldn't be recommended to less talented amateurs of setting-thingsright-for-other-people.

This new book of Mr. Laing's is hard to label. It isn't a mystery, it isn't a thriller exactly, it isn't a novel. It comes nearer to being a collection of short stories bound together in approved fashion by the presence in each of Doctor Scarlett, the "master-mind." But Mr. Laing has interwoven the threads of his episodes much more subtly and completely than is customary, so the book turns out to be no collection of short stories, either. Anyway, it's a thoroughly entertaining book, skilfully written, and filled with a variety of incident ranging from the nearly tragic to the broadly comic—from the episode of a husband who administers poison to his wife to that of the terriers, co-voyagers, who blatantly and indecently misbehave at a ship-board wedding. It has wit and humor—Mr. Laing's and Doctor Scarlett's—and has the genial quality of making one glad to be a member of the S. S. Bankong Ayefs passenger list: to be, as it were, in the same boat with even the worst afflicted sahib or memsahib of them all.