sexual and a bad man. Kellogg is arguing that, when "attacked" by such a man, a youth has the same right as does a girl to defend his "honor"and honor means much to a Mexican youth-despite the fact that the lawbooks make no such provision, certainly not when the youth is over 21. Even a homosexual reader might be willing to shrug off Benson Kellogg's above-quoted remarks, if he could believe that the lawyer was merely making the best defense he could out of the material at hand. However, Bart Spicer puts this kind of thinking into his hero's mind and mouth again and again throughout the book. At one point he thinks to himself of homosexuals as "mildly nauseating." His word another time is "sickening." The whole fabric of the novel is shot through with this attitude.

Good, bad, and indifferent, not one character in Act of Anger has an enlightened, informed or even tolerant view of homosexuality. Political opponents, attorneys at daggers-drawn, loathsome private eyes, jealous women, persons as opposed to each other as can be in life, all join in this novel in one thing, the hatred of homosexuals.

As for the three homosexuals in the book, all are unpleasant. Duquesne, the murdered man, was a bully, a shady operator of shadier businesses, a spoiled rich-man's son. Harold Elsinore "Duquesne's male mistress"

is weak, dependent, hysterical. Incidentally he is the only character in the novel to attempt to put up a defense of homosexuality, and Spicer makes it puny and ridiculous in his mouth. The third homosexual, discussed but never shown the reader, is a male prostitute named Billy Bayonne. Spicer casts slurs at these names. It is worth noting that he himself writes mystery novels under the name Jay Barbette.

One is puzzled as to why Spicer

elected to construct a murder trial story centering around a homosexual crime. He either loathes homosexuals, or it is his hairy-chested Hemingwayesque pose to pretend to loathe them. I opt for the latter. And I will tell you why. Spicer has been a newspaperman, a soldier, a free-lance journalist for a number of years. He is in his forties. He has travelled and lived and written virtually all over the world. It is difficult to believe that in all that time and travel he can have maintained the provincial, unsophisticated, downright ignorant prejudices he spews in this novel.

No, he has evidently catered to what he assumed were the prejudices of the mass reading public. He must have believed that by attacking a minority that is not as yet in a class with the other minorities in our country he would be on unassailable ground. But sensational as it tries to be, the novel is too improbable throughout to achieve wide success. The men for the most part Our hero certainly behave like John Wayne in his lesser Westerns. All fists and righteous indignation, Ben Kellogg is an unlikely lawyer hero. I doubt if even Gregory Peck could make him plausible although arrangements are being made for a movie adaptation. Surely Spicer knows that middle-aged professional men do not go about constantly threatening to beat each other up. Or has he spent all his time, in all those countries. where he's lived, inside cheap movie theatres?

But lest we get too far away from the subject of this review, here is a sample of Spicer's handling of a character and a theme. The theme is evident. The character is supposed to be a Los Angeles Police Captain named Valentine. I had hopes for this figure in the book at first. He nearly laughs in hero Kellogg's face when the latter used the term "homosexual rape." But soon the Captain has become just an-

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