ruins his life, looking for his identity.

Dr. Frazier is a successful surgeon, married to a Jew. He is a gentile, but his colleagues and friends are mostly Jewish. During his drinking bout, reveals strong anti-Semitic emotions, coupled with repressed homosexuality. Most of the novel deals with the reactions of his friends and his wife to his anti-Semitic outpourings. However, underneath this is the revulsion he has created by his sudden intense, sexual preoccupation with a group of homosexuals, particularly one young Mexican boy.

This is George Sklar's second book with a strong homosexual theme; the first was Promising Young Men, Crown, 1951, Signet, 1954.

Anger and revulsion are the aftermath of Dr. Frazier's "weak moment," partly because he is intelligent and much is expected of him.

On the other hand, we have the dumb brute kind of madness when the control of civilization and its accompanying cruelties force the unintelligent to react in the only way they understand. For this type of person, there should be nothing but pity. Theodora Keogh, another of the reliable authors who frequently include homosexuality in their books, has done a remarkable study of one of these people in The Other Girl, London, Neville Spearman, 1962.

The novel, in addition to being an excellent major treatment of Lesbianism, is alos a roman a clef. Those who remember the yet unsolved and famous "Black Dahlia" murder case will enjoy this novel and its quite believable solution to the case.

Books on the theme can usually be loosely divided between serious studies about respectable people and tripe about the dregs of civilization. The Other Girl is a serious novel about the kind of lesbian most of us never meet; or, if we do, we turn away in shame. Yet she is here presented with the understanding needed, and her inarticulate love and agony are beautifully portrayed.

SHORT NOTES: The February, 1963, issue of Show magazine contains an excellent short story by Graham Greene entitled "May We Borrow Your Husband?" Both the "borrowers" and the just married husband are of interest to readers of gay fiction.

A recent study of the short story by Frank O'Connor, The Lonely Voice, cites three hitherto unrecorded male homosexual short stories. Two are by D. H. Lawrence: "Jimmy and the Desperate Woman" and "The Shades of Spring." The first is quite good and the second of debatable interest. Both have been widely anthologized and are easily available. The third story is called "An Encounter" and is in The Dubliners, by James Joyce. This is also easily located in your public library and is a rather chilling story of two boys who skip school, and the man they meet in a park.

attachine REVIEW

BOOKS in review

MORE STARTLING THAN AMUSING

SMITH AND JONES by Nicholas Monsarrat. William Sloane, 1963. Reviewed by Larry Marvin.

Two novelists have told the Burgess-McLean story before: Rodney Garland in The troubled Midnight and Richard Llewellyn in Mr. Hamish Gleave. One was good, the other poor-both are inferior to this novel.

Nicholas Monsarrat has taken liberties with the facts and shaped a more articulate, artistic, and convincing book.

Deliberately, we are not told where Smith and Jones come from, nor to what country they transfer their allegiance. They defect suddenly and the security officer who has handled their personnel files in the past is detailed to watch them.

The narrator is the security officer, "Drill Pig," so called because he was an army drill master in the past.

Ivan Percival Smith is 46, married 8 years, has no children, and is homosexual. His wife hates him and leaves him in a public scene before the desertion. The reason given in the book is that diplomatic wives are dissatisfied for two reasons, either professional or sexual: in both cases she felt he was "not rising high enough."

Peter Paul Jones is 27, unmarried, a small elegant man with a tongue famous for outrageous and quotable sayings. Despite past scrapes with authority, including the murder (accidental) of a man, he has kept his job because of friends in high places. He is also, of course, gay.

Possibly intentionally we are first made to hate the "drill pig" but be fore the close of the novel we are forced to pity him.

Soon after separate but simultaneous postings to the same embassy, Smith and Jones become roommates. Both get into general trouble, and finally denounce their country and ask for asylum in the other country. They are used as propaganda tools in various ways until their usefulness evaporates. Doggedly "Drill Ag" follows their history. When the popular success wears off, he symbolically closes in for the kill.

Using the many devices invented to end personal privacy, "Drill Pig" listens to the blow by blow account of the disintegration of the homosex-