Books New and Noticeable

THE POWDER KEG. By Frances Marion. (Little, Brown & Co: $3.50. 318 pp.)

Frances Marion is a screen writer of long standing who says her interest in penology originated while she was researching her Oscarwinning "The Big House." Her new novel, "The Powder Keg, is a standard women's-prison movie, printed on paper instead of celluloid.

It has all the standard ingredients, and the

mixture doesn't differ much from the standard formula: a power-mad superintendent, a sympathetic assistant superintendent with all the standard socio-psychological patter at her fingertips, an assortment of sadistic and/or homosexual matrons, and a bunch of female convicts who are really just crazy, mixed-up kids.

Miss Marion says she wrote it as a novel rather than a s screen story because "truth and cold, hard facts are often deleted by the movie censors." Apart from an occasional shady word, however, it is difficult to believe that the censors would object to anything in this novel.