Books: Chile con Carne

SHANGHAI ’37—Vicki Baum—Doubleday, Doran ($2.75).

Author Vicki Baum this week moved her Grand Hotel from Europe to the Orient. Her scene: a Shanghai hotel, in the summer of 1937. Her cast of ten carefully disparate characters: a Chinese banker, his Occidentalized son, a refugee Jewish surgeon who had won the Iron Cross, a svelte White Russian married to a drunken English millionaire, a bespectacled little Japanese journalist, a trained nurse from Iowa and her self-pitying fiance from Hawaii, a tuberculous coolie, a young German musician turned opium addict.

Shanghai ’37 is Novelist Baum’s usual chile con carne (“her eyes went on a pleasure cruise up and down him”), seasoned with local color, a but-life-goes-on philosophy. Curtain sentence: “What must happen, happens.” Thanks to Japanese bombs that fell on the Shanghai Hotel when war came, Author Baum’s ending has more finality than usual.