Books: Thriller

In the spring of 1942 a group of sailors were lolling on the gun deck of a transport at Samoa. One of them picked up a battered, coverless novel and began to read it aloud.

Page one: Bill Saunders beats up an ex-pugilist bouncer in a pub. Page two: the ex-pug is dead and Bill is chased through the streets of London. Page three: Bill breaks into a room to hide, finds there a pretty salesgirl named Jane, and spends the night with her.

Somebody on the deck remarked that this was a book real he-men should read. It was called Kiss the Blood off My Hands. They tore it apart, chapter by chapter, and passed it around.

Bill holds up taxis, pummels prostitutes, robs crooked gamblers, assaults swells in evening clothes—then suddenly discovers he is in love with still-innocent Jane. Jane runs away, hides—then suddenly discovers she loves Bill. For a while they are passionately happy together. But a blackmailer who knows that Bill killed the bouncer suddenly turns up, demands a pound a week and Jane’s favors. Jane kills him. Bill gives a crooked skipper £100 to smuggle Jane out of the country. . . .

That was as far as the men on the gun deck got. The last two chapters had been lost overboard.

Their transport sailed to New Zealand, and the men scoured the bookstores in vain. The transport sailed on. was sunk in the Solomons. Machinist’s Mate Third Class Lloyd Powers, one of the men on the gun deck, got back to the U.S. last January, made another unsuccessful search for a copy of the book. When he landed briefly in the San Diego Naval Hospital, he pestered Librarian Jeanette Barry to try. She appealed for help in Publishers’ Weekly, but still no copy turned up.

Kiss the Blood off My Hands was published by Jarrolds in England in 1940, shortly before Jarrolds was bombed out in the blitz. It was the first novel of 37-year-old Gerald Butler, a onetime chemist who is now director of an advertising firm, and it sold 232,000 copies. He has since written three more novels.

British reviewers took Kiss the Blood off My Hands seriously. Their main complaint: the last two chapters were pure sensationalism.

After Jane kills the blackmailer, Bill first knocks out the attendant at a parking lot, then the owner of a car which he needs to make a getaway. With the unconscious driver in the seat beside him, Bill runs into a bicyclist, and police give chase. When the police car draws alongside, Bill swerves his car into it, wrecks his own to boot. Jane is hurt, the police unconscious, Bill kills the car owner (so the police will blame him for hitting the cyclist), carries Jane, her face so disfigured that she is safe from recognition, to a hospital.