The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 169

THE. PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER BOOK REVIEW Gerald Butler's Novel of Pursuit Author of 'Dark Rainbow9 Wrestles a Creaking Plot I A September Book-of-the-Month Club Selection CHRISTOPHER LA FARCE'S NEW NOVEL I Sud' MAD WITH MUCH HEART. By Gerald Butler. Rinehart New York. 244 pp.

$2.50. Kerietcrd by NELSON ALCItEN THE murderer, crouched behind a tree in the freezing weather, didn't like the looks of the men beating the gorse below. They were going to be cross with him, he knew. That was why he was glad it was so cold: cold made the ground all hard so that no one could follow and find him. The cold was good too because it made you breathe breath-fairies.

One two three very quickly and three cloudy fairies began chasing each other on the winter air. The little girl had seemed like a breath-fairy too, and he had only held her in his hands until she became stilL He hadn't meant to hurt her. And he was afraid of being hurt; so he had run, very fast. For they were all so cross, and they all wanted to hurt him. But he was smarter than any of them and hiding from them all.

HIDING was standing still and getting cold because you weren't Tunning. Running was best, because he could run faster than anyone in the world. The men on the gorse Guest By tho author of EACH TO THE OTHER "Mr. La Fargc tells his talc against a minutely observed background of two memorable cast coast hurricanes Out of the conflict between the most dynami- It- ft Gerald Butler below saw him break out and make a blind run for it. "Pheeeeep! Pheeeeeep! He was a train now.

Nobody got on the line, because he was a train and only stopped for signals. There would not be any signals against him, either, because he was an express. Those men behind would never catch him now. How could they? He was a train, an express train, and they were only running." They might have caught him if 4 cally intrusive or all natural Jorces and tnc character of a woman whose VVT. NYA life centers in the averting of intrusion is engendered The Sudden Cjurst It has tension with-out melodrama, gravity without solemnity, and finally, it is composed in an English prose that unashamedly reveals its contriver to be a well-educated human being.

Clifton Fadiman, liouk-oj the-Month Club Netvs. $2.50 Napoleon Lives Next Door French Emperor Brought Down to he'd kept on being an express be- cause it's so hard for an express to make sharp turns. But just in time he decided he was an auto and then, to make his decision real, somebody parks a car in his path and the chase changes, with the hunted behind the wheel and the hunters wheeling hard behind. THIS intense little novel of flight and pursuit carries Wilson, a plainclothesman, and Bond, a farmer with a vigilante's passion, to the lonely home of the murderer's sis- ter on the moors. Wilson has his hands full by then: he has not only to find his man in the middle of a blizzard but has also to keep Bond from killing him on sight.

He has, too; to make up his mind whether he is on the side of the murderer's sister or against her. Love and duty, drawing him different ways, give him cause for some harassed reflection. "This job out here is a breath of fresh air compared with the things you usually have to do." Wilson tells himself. "Evidence, get evidence. That's your man.

Watch him until he trips. Watch him. follow him. track him, trip him if you can. Get around his friends.

Perhaps his wife will give him away. Get evidence, get evidence. The stinking drabness of it all made his mind revolt as he thought of it When did you last meet anyone so that you and he, or you and she, were able to take each other as you found each other? It's always part of this evidence, evidence, evidence." WILSON, who had always belonged to the world of being against someone, the world of having to trap your man, sits in front of the fire despising the life he had led. He feels that he not only wants to share his life with Mary, the fugitive's sister, but that he wants to belong to her world: the world of being for people instead of against them. Well, good old Wilson comes around all right, you can readily guess, and anyone who has ever seen a Hitchcock thriller will recognize this one.

A strictly prefabricated job, a second-rate "Thirty-Nine Steps," the only character attaining anything like originality is Danny, the murderer. Yet not even he does so to the extent of justifying the title. Indeed the title has no application beyond the fact that Danny's roof is, patently, leaking. WILSON is simply an English marathoner with a heart of gold and a tough assignment. The girl Is out of Elsie Dinsmore, and Bond, even more the marathoner than Wilson, runs more convincingly than he talks.

For he runs and climbs like a mountain goat, but he talks like a showboat ham. Although the author has rigged up every known device to lend suspense to a creaking plot, the devices become dubious and the pace eventually bogs down to a sticky crawl. For the pace of the book is the pace of the pursuit, and that comes to a dead-end about the time that Mary tells Wilson he can't see her any more, and he says he must, and she says he mustn't you get the idea. Gerald Butler's reputation as a hardboiled stylist, first established in "Dark Rainbow," a convincing story of a British deserter, and sustained in "Kiss the Blood Off My Hands," comes up muscle-bound with this one. For the conscientious and sentimental Wilson simply doesn't materialize, as did the predatory and conscienceless Bill Saunders of the latter novel.

Like James Cain, his innovations are tbose of character rather than of plot. And irvthis one both start creaking. Ml EilUIHOR Edited by GEORGE KAO Introduction bv LIN YUTANG 1 The cream of Chinese wit and humor from 400 B.C to the present. "A large and delightful collection made up partly of anecdotes of the philosophers, who used fables to prove their points, and sometimes gave sharp answers; of extracts from Chinese picaresque novels; and of jokes proper and modern humorous sketches It has a flavor of its own, a combination of dry and mature wisdom." Boot-of-the-Month Club Ncus. $3.75 his contemptuous manner made him so unpopular with his superiors that he was usually marked out for an early transfer to some other department.

He never rose above this handicap until the publicity of the Vendemiaire uprising endeared him to a public that was not close enough to feel the burr on his whip. NEITHER marriage nor fame mellowed Napoleon. One suspects that his policy of stimulating zeal by keeping all who surrounded him in a state of nervous apprehension was primarily a case of excusing his natural tendencies. He often declared himself above the laws of morality and he might have well added good manners. His courtiers and family bore the brunt of a churlishness and unreasonableness that put a heavy price on court life.

It was no idle statement that Napoleon made when he exclaimed, "The really happy man is the man who hides himself away from me in the depths of his province When I die, the universe will give one great 'ouf To both Josephine and Marie-Louise he was cruel beyond the point of thoughtlessness. For a time both women enjoyed a measure of consideration, but as their novelty wore off they frequently became the targets of his choicest abuses. He demanded of them a physical stamina and endurance that was more in keeping with the battlefield than 'the drawing room. His son, the King of Rome, was possibly the only person who escaped unscathed. THE story of Napoleon's son is the tale of a brief ghost.

This boy, who was to equal Alexander the Great, died at the age of 21, defeated by his body and his family. His mother, Marie-Louise, was no more than a sheet of paper in the hurricane that struck Europe when his mighty father. Napoleon, fell. If this lad had had time to complete the education his father dreamed of he might have swayed the world. It is significant that although he was taken from Napoleon's influence at the age of three, he fought with unbelievable tenacity all attempts to erase from his mind his father and the implications of being Napoleon's son.

The greatest minds of Europe were put to the problem of making this boy as harmless as possible, but the final victory was accomplished by the iron will within him that drove his body beyond its limits. Miss Creston has avoided altogether the discussion of political and military events that are to be found in any history book. The conversations and incidents given are taken from diaries and memoirs of the period. IN SEARCH OF TWO ACTERS: Some Intimate Aspects of Napoleon and His Son. By Dormer Creston.

Charles Scribner's Sons: New York. 402 pp. $5.00. Reviewed hy GENE E. NEVILLE IT IS easy to pick up a dozen or more books that outline Napoleon's life in a skimpy web ol facts tied down neatly ever so often with a political or military date.

It is very easy in the presence of the great to become so overawed that we forget they are bound by the same idiosyncrasies and faults that distinguish the rest of us. But it is a rare thing to find a like this that makes Napoleon as understandable as the man next door. Some men are motivated by avarice, some by love of family, and a few by a bitter pride and determination to prove their superiority. Napoleon "was too arrogant to develop a sense of inferiority, but the painful knowledge of a social superiority he did not himself possess left an indelible mark on his mind, and a perpetual urge to erase it." Until the Bonaparte boy left Corsica for military school in France his arrogance was only a child's trait. But the galling position of being a penniless country boy inescapably condemned to.

the company of the moneyed aristocracy turned that arrogance into a vindictive drive that never left him. It followed him to the last days of his life when his chief complaint against his captors was their refusal to address him as Emperor. IN HIS early days his tongue was his only defense against the money he could not obtain and the title he had not been born to. His preference at school was to be-eft alone to study, but when circumstances propelled him into contact with other icople he took savage delight in the maliciousness that later kept the court of France in uneasy suspense. It is always a question whether such a man as Napoleon was made by events or whether he would have remained in obscurity if other conditions had prevailed.

It is certain that, for a time at least, his disagree- ableness kept him from attaining any prominence in his chosen career, the army. His brilliance was recognized, but A novel by FRANK D. DAVISON author of Red Heifer "Filled with exact observation, and to anyone who knows dogs it is an en grossing story." N. Y. U'orld-'I 'digram.

"The publishers call this a 'very adult' dog story, and that it an enthralling and very fine story." Chicago Sun. $2.50 AT Att BOOKSTOMS.