Ruth & Judd

To THE GALLOWS I MUST Go--T. S. Matthews--Knopf ($2).

When in Long Island, Judd Gray, corset salesman, murdered Albert E. Snyder, 45, husband of Ruth Brown Snyder, 32, the Manhattan dailies were shocked beyond the drunkenest tabloid editor's most gaudy dream (TIME, April 4, 1927). The Manhattan public was somehow puzzled. How came a curly-haired, weak-mouthed little vendor of female garments, in the vegetable suburbs of a great city, to such a pitch of excitement that he could smash a man's skull with a sash-weight? The tabloids, who followed Judd Gray and Ruth Snyder until (and after) the current shot through them in Sing Sing's death house, explained the case as best they could: Ruth was "a dangerous woman," highly sexed, adamant in her purpose. Judd Gray was a spineless wretch whose infatuation was almost his excuse. The press paid little attention to the victim.

This story has now been taken in hand by a grim young Princeton-Oxford man-- the son of the Episcopal Bishop of New Jersey--as the subject for his first novel. It is written in the first person by the murderer. Of "dangerous" Ruth Snyder (Grace Haxall in the book) Author Matthews makes the most: sends her eyes through the salesman (Todd Lorimer) at their first meeting, undresses her slowly, describes almost nothing except her effect on the salesman, brings up her fiercely female triumph in nakedness before the furnace where they are burning the evidence of their guilt. The Macbeth-like decline of Todd Lorimer under the influence of Lady Macbeth Haxall is dignified by making him a salesman of sofas instead of corsets, a man whose wife is cold and whose mother lives with them. He drinks liquor in startling quantities after Lady Macbeth gets him started. For the murder he is given a hammer instead of a sash-weight. Author Matthews' verdict on the Snyder-Gray case is: Judd Gray not guilty--led astray.

The book's merit (which ill-informed reporters may wrongly ascribe to the Ernest Hemingway influence) is its strength of understatement. Out of a horrible theme it wrings the least possible amount of unnecessary grue. If anyone complains, "Why be gruesome?" un-gay Author Matthews may reply with some justice: "Well, the newspapers are full of this sort of thing. It happens all the time, doesn't it?"

The Author. Thomas Stanley Matthews, 30, has a chin that sticks out from under a nose, eye and brow that might have belonged to St. Paul, patron saint of his preparatory school (Concord, N. H.). Whittling little verses hard as black walnuts is an old pastime of his. Once he wrote:

Who would not live for love? "I," said the dragon. Grinned at the newborn dove And gripped the flagon.

No real dragon but a not easily satisfied litterateur in an increasingly commercial world, he writes TIME'S book reviews (but not this one) after persuasion away from The New Republic where he was a hardworking factotum. He lives in Princeton, N. J. with his wife Julie Cuyler Matthews and sons T. S. Jr. and John. Tennis is his game, A. E. Housman his poet, honesty in letters his main ambition. His first novel (145 pp.) is dedicated to Alfred Richard Orage, prophet in the U. S. of "The Harmonious Development of Man."

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