Odd Odyssey

CRESCENDO--BEING THE DARK ODYSSEY OF GILBERT STROED--Ethel Mannin--Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

Once when Gilbert Stroud, aged 7, was fidgeting with a spoon and fork at table, his stepmother, nerve-wracked from maternity trouble, slapped him with the carving-knife. That, says Author Mannin, was the genesis of 1) a scar on his wrist, 2) his animosity towards women. Aged 10, when his friend's mother embraced him he wriggled out of it. Aged 20, off at the War, when the Stroud blood in him got hot for women, his mind remained cold as cash. Aged 25, he discovered that he wanted a fortune and a blonde wife, a maker of men. When a Stroud wanted something. Destiny always took a hand; the Stroud got it. This Stroud now fixed upon one Lady Isabel. Her eyes were of "green ice," her hair was golden. She glorified in an expressionless face and almost no lips. Such a woman he would not love, he thought, so much as love to own. In order to own her he sacrificed his cherished friend Stemway who had a "dark soul."

"What do you want with me?" asked Isabel of Stroud. He answered, "I prefer to breed from good stock, if you must know!" She married him and repaid the insult by seeing to it no child was born. That beat Stroud, and she added injury to her revenge by giving him good cause to think her unfaithful. That drove him to throttle her, and to drop himself out of the window, thus ending a book which, considering that the author has published five others and should know better by now is not a very good book.