THE GRAND HOTEL BABYLON by Arthur...

THE GRAND HOTEL BABYLON by Arthur Bennett (Penguin: $8.95). The British novelist wrote this rollicking serial-mystery “as a lark” in just 15 days in 1901. When the snobbish head waiter of the Hotel Babylon in London refuses Nella Racksole’s demand for a simple dinner, her father, the American millionaire Theodore Racksole, buys the posh establishment on the spot for the pleasure of firing the impertinent server. (The incident was obviously inspired by New York Herald owner James Gordon Bennett, who bought the future Ciro’s of Monte Carlo to ensure he would be able to lunch there whenever he chose.) The rash purchase plunges Racksole and the irrepressible Nella (“who, by twenty years or so of parental spoiling, had come to regard herself as the feminine equivalent of the Tsar of All the Russias”) into a world of international intrigue as they struggle to preserve the life and reputation of the minor German potentate, Prince Eugen of Posen. Bennett seems to have regarded Americans as enthusiastic, energetic and slightly vulgar, and his grudgingly admiring descriptions of these characters only add to the fun.