Last Summer's Dresses

TIP ON A DEAD JOCKEY, AND OTHER STORIES (242 pp.)--Irwin Shaw--Condom House ($3.95).

As a novelist (The Young Lions, Lucy Crown) and dramatist (Bury the Dead, The Gentle People), Irwin Shaw has set no worlds afire. But there are few American writers who can match him for consistent readability and excitement in the field of the short story. His famous The Girls in Their Summer Dresses (1939) says nearly all that there is to say about urban love; his vengeful Sailor Off the Bremen, after 18 years, is still powerful enough to make a reader wince. This new collection never quite reaches the same heights, but is similarly concerned with love and adventure, is written with clarity and intelligence, and makes a skillful record of the mid-century's "wandering and troubled years."

Touch of the Supernatural. Most of the characters in these stories are beginning to feel their age and, if they have not found religion, at least have been brushed by the supernatural. The title story deals with a former U.S. Army pilot, penniless in Paris, who refuses $25,000 to pull a job for a smuggler because of a superstitious hunch that the job would be fatal for him. When a less imaginative friend succeeds, the flyer knows that fear, and not a hunch, has dictated his refusal.

In Age of Reason, an engineer tries to dismiss a haunting dream that someone near and dear will die in an air crash on May 14; the story ends in Lady or the Tiger fashion, with the man waiting powerlessly to learn the fate of the plane that is carrying his wife and child to him--on May 14. The Kiss at Croton Falls takes a lighter view of dreams as Mrs, Mull visits companionably each night with her dead husband until he makes the mist ike of bringing a pretty redhead home with him--twice--for tea.

What the Mirror Shows. In the funny and sad love stories, the summer dresses seem to have faded a little. Then We Were Three flattens its triangle in the familiar way, with one of the lovers left out in the cold; In the French Style contains the despair of the aging bohemian as his last and best mistress takes refuge in marriage; Voyage Out, Voyage Home brings some fresh insights to that sturdy chestnut, the doomed romance between a healthy lover and a tubercular one.

Irwin Shaw, 44, has commuted between France, Switzerland and Italy for the past six years, is now as studiously nonpolitical as he was formerly tumultuously partisan. His current work reflects his present detachment; it is blander than before, as accomplished as ever but less impassioned. But so are the times, and Author Shaw seems to argue between the lines that he still holds up a mirror to life, and cannot put more into his stories than his mirror shows him.

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