Books in Brief

Some Best-Sellers

Anatomy of a Murder, by Robert Traver (St. Martin’s, $4.50). One may say what one likes (provided one says less than Dwight Macdonald said) about James Gould Cozzens’ By Love Possessed: but its replacement by Anatomy of a Murder as number one fiction bestseller is an act of presumption toward which the world of letters should have shown a greater resentment. Anatomy is the worst book I can remember having read. (There are worse ones, of course, but, mercifully, the fact of their existence, like that of hell, is an act of faith, and therefore impalpable.) The author is a practicing judge who dabbles with literature on the side (I suspect he would have ordered the electric chair for any writer who came before his bench having done to the law what His Honor has done to literature), and evidently will make a fortune out of it. The story is about the trial of a man who shoots another man who raped the first man’s wife, and was he or was he not temporarily insane under Michigan law? To find the answer, literary deduction is in order. (“I was now convinced that Barney Quill had been waiting for the lieutenant; that he had deliberately relieved his bartender not only to get him out of the way of the anticipated showdown but also to in turn warn Barney and further so that he, Barney, could get behind the bar himself. [Out of context? Yeah? All right: we’ll go on.] It had been his fortress.

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Some Best-Sellers

Anatomy of a Murder, by Robert Traver (St. Martin’s, $4.50). One may say what one likes (provided one says less than Dwight Macdonald said) about James Gould Cozzens’ By Love Possessed: but its replacement by Anatomy of a Murder as number one fiction bestseller is an act of presumption toward which the world of letters should have shown a greater resentment. Anatomy is the worst book I can remember having read. (There are worse ones, of course, but, mercifully, the fact of their existence, like that of hell, is an act of faith, and therefore impalpable.) The author is a practicing judge who dabbles with literature on the side (I suspect he would have ordered the electric chair for any writer who came before his bench having done to the law what His Honor has done to literature), and evidently will make a fortune out of it. The story is about the trial of a man who shoots another man who raped the first man’s wife, and was he or was he not temporarily insane under Michigan law? To find the answer, literary deduction is in order. (“I was now convinced that Barney Quill had been waiting for the lieutenant; that he had deliberately relieved his bartender not only to get him out of the way of the anticipated showdown but also to in turn warn Barney and further so that he, Barney, could get behind the bar himself. [Out of context? Yeah? All right: we’ll go on.] It had been his fortress.