CRIMINAL AND PRISONER

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27488, 23 October 1954, Page 3

CRIMINAL AND PRISONER

In For Life. By Tom Runyon. Andre Deutsch. 314 pp.

Between 1932 and 1936 Mr Runyon took part in a number of bank robberies in America including two in which people were killed (though his gun did not fire the fatal shots). He was sentenced to imprisonment for life and is now serving his sentence in lowa State Penitentiary. Whilst in prison he began to write for a convict magazine, and finding what was obviously an unsuspected tahent he went from strength to strength as a journalist; many American national newspapers bought his work or ran regular features by him. Many a struggling free lance writer must envy Mr Runyon his pull of novelty and consider taking his talent to a more original situation.

The present book is an account of Mr Runyon’s early life and his criminal period and of his subsequent life m prison. He has written an account of prison life that is interesting and in some ways thought provoking. Some, of it is a little astonishing; the idea of convicts listening to crime serials on their individual radios does not appear to surprise the author though it may the reader, as may the orchestra that plays during meals. Mr Runyon has written a vivid and intelligent comment upon prison life and he shows considerable skill in his pen portraits of the people he meets there.

As an account of the mind of a criminal the book is more disappointing; it does not help in elucidating why one man taker, to crime in difficult circumstances and another does not nor does one feel that Mr Runyon himself has considered it very clearly. His accounts of his own actions during his criminal period have a curious detachment and impersonality that make them of little interest. Nor does he really make clear one very vital point—the effect that his prison term has had on his own evaluation of his actions. This is a most vital point; certainly Mr Runyon says “I was a fool,” whether he also says “I was wrong” is more important, but not clear.