Books: Smart Guy’s Fall

WHAT’S IN IT FOR ME?—Jerome Weidman—Simon & Schuster ($2.50).

The biggest heel in contemporary U. S. fiction is a smart guy named Harry Bogen. This Bronx boy made good last year in Jerome Weidman’s I Can Get It For You Wholesale as the slickest, crookedest trader in Manhattan’s garment centre, who railroaded his partner to prison, ended up with plenty of dough, a fancy chorus girl named Martha Mills and an invincible conviction that he knew it all.

What’s in it for Me? will rejoice readers: It narrates Harry Bogen’s decline & fall. Harry is such a skunk-like character that in the first book many a reader may have been too sickened to notice Author Weidman’s strong disapproval of his hero. In this sequel Author Weidman gives Harry a moral shellacking which only an idiot could miss. But before Harry goes down he puts on a fast show. After loafing three months on his last crooked earnings, Harry decides to bounce Martha and go back into the dress business. The trouble is that Martha is a smarter guy than Harry: Before she is through with him he is neglecting the dress business to keep track of her and has swindled his partner out of $15,000 to oblige her with a trip around the world. When detectives beat him to the boat, Harry makes a getaway, wires Martha the whereabouts of all his cash and tells her to meet him in Philadelphia. In her gleeful reply Martha thanks him for the money, bids good-by and nuts to him in a telegram which makes Harry Bogen’s most inspired malice sound like baby talk.

Harry Bogen will not be missed. If Author Weidman has any more like Harry up his sleeve, God help the good name of Manhattan’s garment centre.