Books: Mixed Fiction, Sep. 20, 1954

THE HEART IN EXILE, by Rodney Garland (Coward-McCann; $3.50), is an English novel about homosexuality. Its psychiatrist-author has adopted a pseudonym to write about a psychiatrist and his life around the London “underground,” where homosexuals lead their furtive existence. The book is a sociological blueprint in the fictional form of a suspense thriller. The psychiatrist tries to find out why a personable young solicitor committed suicide on the eve of his marriage. The quest leads deep into the English underground, which ranges from the cockney East End to the elegant West End and the House of Commons, has its own special pubs, clubs and social stratification. Author Garland writes of sordid facts and stunted lives with detached directness and evident perception.

WHAT’S THE BIG HURRY?, by

James Yaffe (Atlantic-Little, Brown; $3.75), is a study in ambition. Dan Waxman is 17, restless, and an orphan, when a family powwow apprentices him to a shopkeeping cousin and the “steadying influence of Hats, Gloves and Accessories.” Dan is soon interested in another product: money and how to “play tricks with it, buy it up cheap and sell it back expensive . . . baby it along, and let it reproduce itself.” He rises with the bull market of the late ’20s, moves into a penthouse on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive. “The world is divided into two parts,” he tells his soft-spoken wife, “1200 Lake Shore Drive —and everywhere else.” The stock-market crash issues Dan a ticker-tape passport to the limbo of “everywhere else.” For the rest of the novel, Dan forgets about the race to the top and retrains for the human race. Without lapsing into dialect, 27-year-old Author Yaffe siphons off the pain of his hero’s rise and fall with a broad funnel of Jewish family humor that sometimes recalls a good TV session with Sam Levenson.

THE ANATOMY 017 A CRIME, by

Joseph F. Dinneen (Scribner, $2.95). At 7:10 on the night of Jan. 17, 1950, seven masked men walked into the Boston office of Brink’s Inc.. the armored-truck service.

At 7:30 they walked out with $1,500,000. It was the biggest known burglary of modern times. Not a G of the swag was recovered, but Author Dinneen (at least in his novel) says that the FBI and the Boston police know who committed the crime; they just don’t have enough evidence to arrest. A crime reporter for the Boston Globe who writes with the crack ling authority of one who knows every bent nose on his beat, Author Dinneen calls his fictionalized story “a startling parallel” to the Brink’s case. Actually, the parallel is almost exact. His hero is a cop, his villain a stool pigeon, and the climax of the book is a vivid description of exactly how the big job was pulled.

MOONSCAPE (Putnam; $3.50).”With clumsy fingers I undid two buttons of her frock, slipped my hand beneath it and …” And Mika Waltari, whose bestsellers (The Egyptian, The Adventurer, The Wanderer) would be considerably shorter if his heroines knew about zippers, is off meandering again, this time in his native Finland. This volume consists of five not-very-short stories. The title yarn tells what happens to the unbuttoned country girl: she grows up to be a movie star with a boudoir-view of life (“There are no impotent men, only unskilled women, don’t you think?”). Another story, The Tie from Paris, is about a middle-aged banker whose pretty young secretary tells him one day: “You’ve got marvelous hands—they make me go all limp.” The trouble begins when the banker’s wife finds lipstick on some of his handkerchiefs but it ends to everybody’s satisfaction when the secretary discovers that the banker’s boss has hands that make her go even limper. This time round, Author Waltari badly misses the ghostwriter of his best books: history.