other puppet in Spicer's hairy-chested fantasy, braying such unlikely claptrap as:

"Know anything about sex perverts?"

"Not much. I'm learning."

"I hope you got a strong stomach. I've been dealing with them all my life and they still make me sick. I've seen what they can do and I tell you there isn't a single one of them who ought to be let walk the streets. They are either criminals or they are sick people. Whatever they are, they ought to be locked up.'

And finally:

"I just don't like the idea of some kid being executed for knocking off one of those scummy perverts. I'd hate to see anyone hang for that. I'd like to kill a couple myself."

Now, in all fairness, a writer of fiction cannot be held responsible for the attitudes expressed by his characters. But Captain Valentine is drawn by Spicer as a sympathetic character. He stands up to the wicked rich man in the book, who is trying to buy off Police, District Attorney, even our unimpeachable hero. Spicer means the reader to like Captain Valentine and, presumably he is using him as a mouthpiece. One wonders to what cave and to what hairy female Captain Valentine returns at night. It is a little difficult to believe in Captain Valentine as a contemporary fig-

ure.

Granting that this is a court-room novel, an entertainment rather than a serious work, still doesn't the reader have the right to expect that the writer will have bothered to inform himself on matters of fact? This is, Mr. Spicer, called research. Every good novelist does it. In Act of Anger our hero attorney reads "a" book on homosexuality. One wonders, from the text, if Spicer himself read even

one.

At a guess, I doubt if any novelist today, even Bart Spicer, could have,

one

without shame and contrition, spewed such hatred and loathing as this book contains, at Negroes, Jews, or any other recognized minority. Yet it is a book that does not hesitate to display

—

as I have been able to show here only fragmentarily the most vicious, ignorant and inflammatory prejudice, prejudice which one is almost forced to believe springs from a dangerous kind of neurosis, a type verging, teetering, on paranoia.

One rather bleakly wonders if homosexuals are now going to have to meet increased attacks from a quarter where, once upon a time, they could count on fair treatment, a quarter once controlled by mature, thoughtful, truthful and gentle people, the writers of novels. This book deserves strong protest from the minority it so savagely attacks.

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