Books: Seventh Commandment

As FOR THE WOMAN—Francis Iles—Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

Francis Iles, who as Anthony Berkeley writes detective fiction, is also known to U. S. readers as the author of two much-admired psychological murder stories, Before the Fact and Malice Aforethought.

No murder story, although it almost turns into one, As for the Woman is the sinister tale of a vacation love-affair between an Oxford undergraduate and a doctor’s wife. “There are few human relationships more complicated than a love affair between a young man and an older woman,” says Author Iles, “and there are few more summarily dismissed by the world at large.”

Alan Littlewood at 21 is a frail, girlish-featured, vain, romantic poetaster, with an acute inferiority complex and a touch of t.b. Mrs. Pawle, blonde, voluptuous, thirtyish, nymphomaniac, is the wife of Alan’s doctor, who is a lanky, cynical sadist. The scene of Alan’s seduction ought to sell at least a couple of thousand copies. The preliminary scenes are as satirical as they are authoritative; whether they amuse or disgust depends on the reader. But if the reader is amused by the last half of the story, it is no fault of Author lies. From a silly romantic, Mrs. Pawle changes to a sinister slut, experimenting shamelessly with Alan’s emotions, goading him to a peak of frenzy in which he attempts to commit murder. He is let off with awful humiliation in her husband’s diabolical revenge.

The moral: see the Seventh Commandment.