SOME RECENT FICTION

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31961, 12 April 1969, Page 4

SOME RECENT FICTION

A Crack in The Sidewalk. By i Ruth Wolff. Dent. 282 i PP- i This is not the first book ' nor will it be the last to tell j the story of a poor family ' living in a small American , town, but “A Crack in The , Sidewalk” is saved from J mediocrity by the compassion : and sincerity Ruth Wolff' brings to the telling. Brockton is a country milling town with a population of 14,000. The Templetons live above Drexel’s Hardware and Seed Store on Main Street, just on the wrong side of the tracks. They are poor enough to have to sleep eight to a room, but proud enough for Daddy to refuse a competi-tion-prize television set because he considers it ungodly. The story is told in the first person by the second daughter Linsey, “Somewhere, I thought, it is raining on trees and grass. Flowers are popping up. But outside our window it only rained on bricks and cement and rooftops.” There is Daddy who lives by his Bible, soft • spoken hard - working Mama, the three sisters Kevy, Linsey and Arlie, the little boys Pern, Jody and the heart - breakingly retarded Pleas who will never walk or speak. “His eyes were like very deep water with light coming from somewhere under it. What his eyes spoke were like parts of the Bible 1 couldn’t understand. If only he could speak to us, tell us .. .” The two most colourful characters in the book are the children’s backwoods Granny and her young second husband, Boy. Granny works her little farm as she did before they were married and Boy sits on the verandah playing his guitar and singing. “He had a new yellow and silver guitar Granny had given him for Christmas. Every long once in a while he would strum it, the same chord, a long sad plaintive sound. Granny, working out in the garden, would lift her head like a bird at the note of its mate in some far off tree.” There is a bucolic charm about these sections of the book, with their sensitive descriptions of (he hills, woods and creek, and the house in its quiet hot clearing, that make one as sorry as the Templeton children, when the visit to Granny is over. Linsey’s struggle for success as a folk singer makes ordinary reading after such prose. This is a folksy poignant story containing all . the minutiae of childhood.

I Give Them Swing Bands. By Eve Ebbett. Whitcombe and Tombs. 190 pp.

The subject of this rather moving book is Maori-Pakeha relations, and the loyalty shown by a white family to Maori neighbours in circumstances which increasingly become in conflict with Its own interests. Bill Evans and his wife Janice have rented a house to the Te Kiris, who fill it with succeeding bunches of relations, but are good, friendly and honest people. Only Charlie is a bit of a Lothario, and when he is accused of raping Dora Cade —the plain daughter of a deeply-religious white woman —the story gains currency despite the fact that it is highly improbable, and in no way characteristic of Charlie's assaults on female hearts. Gradually the Evans family find themselves enmeshed in Charlie’s problem, and eventually it engulfs them all. Bill refuses an advantageous offer for his business, because it would entail turning the Te Kiri family out of their home; young Nick, a friend of young Joe Te Kiri, fights with another boy at school over the suggestion that “Charlie is going to prison,” and loses his chance of selection for a Rugby trial; and the greatest sufferer is 18-year-old Sharon Evans. She is engaged to a local “parti,” Peter Jefferson, but quarrels with him irrevocably when his stiff-necked mother raises strong objections to having the Te Kiris as guests at the wedding. The reader may believe that Charlie, whether innocent or guilty, was not really worth all this trouble, for he is a pretty feckless person, but the author seeks to prove that a principle is involved, and that the Evans family acted rightly ■in upholding it.

Mills. By Manning O’Brlne. Herbert Jenkins. 255 pp.

“Mills” is a thriller with a rather more authentic background than most: the author, like his hero, was a British secret agent who finished the war with the Garibaldi partisans in Italy. The men and methods of the K.G.8., the C.I.A. and the M. 1.6 can therefore be taken with less than a pinch of salt. This is not a war novel, however, but one set in the present, the action of which is the result of Mills’s determination to revenge certain German reprisals on a small Italian village, San Martino. When the German responsible falls by chance—or authorial good management—into his bands, Mills leaves the British service feeling that his personal mission has been accomplished. This is approximately the situation at the beginning of the story. Mills finds, however, that a secret agent can never become a private person—or, at least, not easily. All the men in the business think he has ulterior motives, treason perhaps? “The formula for LSD2S is wanted by the K.G.B. and the C-I.A. and M. 1.6 but Mills won’t reveal it . . . why?” It becomes Mills’s task to convince all interested that, his deplorable ethic of revenge is sincere. The resourceful cunning with which he plays off his pursuers one against another, the callous brutality with which he kills off those of his pursuers he cares for least, his tough, greying charm (we are told this, but it does not quite come over) impress one as a less loyal Bond, of more motivated actions and more

casual bite. We do not, of course, see Mills plotting; we are only left agape (perhaps) at the results of it. One must mention the least savoury aspect of this book (which may yet find its readers). The slick writing shows up badly in the numerous bedroom scenes. (Mills, his lifework of revenge completed, is looking for a wife). The beautiful Irish Malrhi is done less than justice by this explicit yet mawkish handling of sex. Act of Fear. By Michael Collins. Michael Joseph. 223 pp.

This book won the Mystery Writers of America Award for the best first mystery novel of 1967. Dan Fortune, the narrator, is a private detective working mainly in New York’s West Side. He was born in the slums and was a petty thief in his early years, until an accident when he was stealing from a ship in dock caused him to lose his left arm. He was engaged by an Italian boy, Pete Vitanza, to find his friend, Jo-Jo Olsen, who had disappeared. Dan said that it was no unusual thing for a boy of 18 to be missing for a while, but Pete insisted that Jo-Jo would not have suddenly gone away without his treasured motor cycle. The only unusual thing that had happened in the neighbourhood was that a policeman on the beat was knocked unconscious and robbed of gun. handcuffs, and all. Perhaps Jo-Jo might have been involved but it was unlikely. However, Dan made routine enquiries, and soon the climate of harmless escapade gave way to fear, torture, violence, and murder. The garotting tentacles of gangsterdom close firmly on those concerned in the search for Jo-Jo, and upon many who had lived even on the fringe of his life. His family, the owner of the garage where he had worked, his girl-friends, all encounter tragedy and terror. Their, reactions, and the deteriorating effects upon their characters as the gang’s rule of fear sweeps over them, are excellently told by Michael Collins as the story of Dan’s search and Jo-Jo’s evasive tactics converge violently. The book is a powerful portrayal of social conditions which the author knows well. The Inseparables. By Russell Braddon. Michael Joseph. 175 pp.

A guilt-ridden Germany, haunted 20 years after the war by the spectre of Nazi atrocities, is the theme of this eerie novel, which is set in Dachau on Christmas Day, 1968. Erich Strauss is a young student who cherishes a gnawing uneasiness as to the parts played by his father and mother in the war. His father, an S.S. officer, had served in Russia, but also, after being wounded there, in certain concentration camps, and had been captured in 1945 by the Americans, who detained him for three years before releasing him in 1948. Erich also suspects his mother of illicit war-time dealings, first with the Nazis and then with the American conquerors, so he deliberately takes a dose of a hallucinogenic drug, and drives to Dachau (now open to the public) to try to gauge the atmosphere created there by the agony of its wartime inmates, and the bestiality of their guards. He finds a good deal more than he bargains for. Four of the former victims materialise—a girl and three men whose fates had been inter-related—and the horrified visitor learns from them all about the grisly routine of mass-murder carried out in the camp. There is only one Jew in the quartette—a boy who had been butchered in his teens—and he and the girl, who had died at the age of 20, deride their visitor when he speaks of “my generation,” as if it differed from the make up of their own. The girl who had missed the advent of television wants to know all about it; the boy, a virgin at the time of his death, presses Erich for information about the joys of sex. All four are scornful of the better world to which their visitor claims to belong, and he is forced to accept the unhappy belief that man will always protect his interests by brutality and murder if necessary. The author has annoying tricks of style, but

makes his points neatly through the agency of the ghosts, who all proclaim death to be a happier state than life.

Talking Turkey. By K. Allen Saddler. Michael Joseph. 207 pp.

When David Stevens accepted a brief to find out the whereabouts of a Mr Mills little did he know that he would be involved in a political intrigue which would draw him from London to Turkey. From the outset he Imagined that he was to be involved only in the normal activity of an investigator of missing persons. But from the moment when the Foreign Office engaged him as well and supplied him with a colleague named Underhill, a shroud of mystery enveloped the affair. The elusive Mr Mills was reckoned to be involved in peddling either genuine or false diamonds. Stevens, by good fortune, for a season was in possession of a famous diamond only to have it stolen from him soon afterwards. In time, he managed to discover that the diamond was a replica, which had been manufactured by a most sophisticated scientific procedure. The search for the source of manufacture leads to Turkey, where as soon as the place of origin is uncovered the manufacture of diamonds is seen to be of minor importance to the criminals, compared with their deadly scientific experiments in laser beams. The shroud of mystery is lifted when Stevens finds himself a potential cause of the assassination of a political enemy. This is the time when the pursuit of Mills becomes of less importance than the destruction of this new menace to the world’s peace and security. The development and resolution of Steven’s dilemma gives us a few hours of pleasant reading not unrelated to the intrigues of our present day life and the possible dangers of the "uture.

Stranger To The Truth. By Nora Sanderson. Mills and Boon. 192 pp.

The path of true love tn this romantic novel follows predictable if occasionally perilous ways, but the author must be commended for her ingenious plot. It is the story of the impersonation by an American girl (undertaken for a good reason) of a New Zealand friend who has spent most of her life in the United States and has been invited to visit her family in Christchurch. Kathy Burnett, substituting for Kathy Rochester, is received by her supposed father and brother, Adam, with open arms, but the latter quickly spots the deception, and he and his “sister” after a preliminary quarrel fall in love. Adam’s engagement to a charming girl necessarily complicates the situation, but all ends well as we knew It would. Nora Sanderson has done her best for New Zealand tourism by making Kathy the recipient of all kinds of information about the country, ranging from the uses of greenstone to the wonders Of thermal springs, and arranging that she shall be flown extensively over both islands with travelogue descriptions of their charms. But do good Kiwis really address their womenfolk habitually as “Honey” and pepper their conversations with “Sure” and “Yeah, yeah?”