OVERFLOWING VIOLENCE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 766, 26 March 1954, Page 14

OVERFLOWING VIOLENCE

DEAD MEN FALLING, by Desmond Cory; Frederick Muller, English price 9/6. THE LONG LOUD SILENCE, by Wilson Tucker; ‘Bodley Head, English price 8/6. THIS WAY FOR A SHROUD, by James Hadley Chase; Robert Hale, English price 10/6. HERE is more violence in these three books than in any I have ever bracketed. In Desmond Cory’s last thriller I did not like the ethics of his British secret service agent in holding back knowledge of a Nazi treasure. In Dead Men Falling, Johnny Fedora, tracking down this treasure for himself, is led through a maze of: mystery and killing to a cache in the Austrian- Alps, where the chase ends in hair-raising mountain climbing. An exciting tale, but too steely for my liking. In imaginative force and _ literary quality, The Long Loud Silence is far the best of the three. After a drunken sleep, an American soldier finds himself on the eastern side of the Mississippi, separated from his tinit, and in a world mortally struck by bombing with explosives and pestilence. The whole eastern half of the United States is sealed off from the rest of the nation, and anyone. attempting to pass the barrier is shot. With all corporate life destroyed, the

stricken half reverts to the law of the jungle. When, through guile and killing, this man succeeds in crossing to the other side, he discovers, that thqugh immune himself, he is a carrier of pestilence, and has to return. The story of his adventures and the collapse of a civilised society into a condition more primitive than that of cave-men, is powerfully told; but the abandonment of one half of the Union by the other is quite incredible. In This Way for a Shroud, there is no war catastrophe to excuse the hideous’ evil. I am again sickened by James Hadley Chases’s killings, and in the ending there is a new kind of shock. The nausea begins in the first chapter with six murders and the horrible mutilation of one of the victims-the opening of a war between authority and a gangster who, with California assigned him as territory, murders for safety with as little compunction as a man killing a rabbit. Regarding himself as safe through the removal of essential witnesses, this head gangster gives a jaunty interview to the press and appears in television, only to be killed by a superior gangster, who takes over the business, including the dead man’s wife. What may be the effect of this mixture of murder and’ lust on foreigners as a picture of life in America?

A.

M.