The White Moll

Rhoda Gray works the New York slums as the White Moll, giving away what she is thought to steal — until she is trapped into playing a real criminal, wanted by the police and by the gang whose part she is acting. Packard was a Montreal railway engineer who turned his years on the line into fiction and then created Jimmie Dale; the underworld here is his best, and the double identity is worked out with an engineer's rigour. Fifty-nine plates of New York street life by George Luks and George Bellows give the slums Rhoda Gray walks a face as hard and human as Packard's prose.