On the Make

New York: Farrar & Rinehart. Good. (c.1929). First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [a sound copy, but well-worn all around]. Fourteen stories, mostly about college boys and working girls, at the tail end of the Roaring Twenties -- "hard boiled episodes in the lives of a group of hard boiled young people" (quoted from the dust jacket, NOT present on this copy), one of the earlier uses of the term "hard-boiled." A Goodreads commenter, "David," nailed it pretty well: "The prose is faux Hemingway; the plots are purposefully stagnant; and the characters are interchangeable." A contemporary review described the general milieu: "Dance halls, (truncated) speakeasies, cheap motor cars figure in these stories. Riordan is a good reporter of behavior who tries to keep himself out of the episodes." (It's probable that some of these tales had been published previously in magazines, although the only one I've been able to confirm is "Born to Suffer," which was printed in a 1928 issue of the periodical "Salient," published by the New School for Social Research in New York.) The author apparently made no further attempts at fictional writing, although much later in his life (if OCLC has made the right connection) he wrote a couple of books on the topic of combinatorial analysis, whatever the heck that is. . (Inventory #: 29552)