Intrusion in the Dust

REPRISAL (3 10 pp.)--Arthur Gordon-Simon & Schuster ($3).

A good many people in Hainesville thought they knew who was in the gang that killed Nathan Hamilton's pretty wife and three other Negroes. But smart people weren't saying. The Aycock boys and Bilsy Shoup were put on trial for "intimidating a Federal witness"--they had beaten up a Negro who saw them cleaning their guns. But Bilsy and the Aycocks pleaded self-defense, and they were acquitted, as everyone had known they would be.

In Author Gordon's fictional echo, with alterations, of the 1946 lynchings near Monroe, Ga. (TIME, Aug. 5, 1946), two people weren't content to let the case rest. One of them was Melady, a New York reporter who had covered the intimidation trial. The other was Nathan Hamilton, husband of one of the victims. Up North when the verdict came, Nathan packed a Luger in his bag and started south.

Reporter Melady gets the truth in the end, and Nathan gets two of the Aycocks before he is cornered and driven to suicide. But the characters are a mighty long time aflounderin' around in the Southern-cliche brakes before release comes. Streams of tobacco juice squirt in all directions, brass spittoons chime, calico dresses strain around the exciting hips of 15-year-old girls, and somewhere a mockingbird sings.

This intrusion into the tired dust of the Faulkner country carries little conviction, even though 38-year-old Author Gordon was born in Savannah, comes of an old Southern family, and obviously is against lynchings. His variation on an old theme, played for chills, is not likely to add to anybody's understanding of a complex problem.

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