Love as Blackmail

HANDS AS BANDS--C. T. Revere--Long & Smith ($2).

Even Old Testament students might not recognize Author Revere's grotesque title, ripped from a verse of Ecclesiastes: "And I find more bitter than death the woman, whose heart is snares and nets, and her hands as bonds." Not so much a tract on marital infidelity as a diatribe against the grasping mistress, it may be of interest to U. S. husbands in the same pickle as Revere's hero.

Sherrill had risen from a poor Midwestern boyhood to a partnership in a big old Manhattan brokerage firm, a house, wife & children in Yonkers, a fat income, fat prospects. On the verge of middle age he still had his health and good looks. But he had fallen in love with Sylvia March Brownlow Wickliffe, pet-named June. A luscious copper-brunette, she fired Sherrill's blood, let him buy her presents, but for a long time would not give him what he wanted. When she became his mistress, he soon found her a hard one. Business troubles, his wife, a sick child, even golf had to go by the board when she summoned him. As her toils tightened Sherrill began to hate her, contemplated first suicide, then murder. He came close to committing both. But a lucky series of breaks gave him his self-respect again, gave him the strength to stand up against his vampire. When she saw her power over him was gone she went too. Sherrill, well-singed, told himself he would never take up with a firebrand again.

Not for its story alone will Hands as Bands be read by many a downtown New Yorker. For Author Revere is that formidable thing, a businessman turned author in middle life. He is the cotton expert for Munds, Winslow & Potter. His market letters have for years been famed as models of rhetoric as well as sagacity. Friends and critics have told him for years he should have been a writing man. Now he is confident he has justified their and his belief that he could do a big novel in a big way. His story barges indomitably on & on through 330 pages with never a trace of weariness on Author Revere's part. (He, too, lived a double life--with his book--while writing and rewriting it secretly at his New Jersey home, in spare moments over four years, giving up to his muse even golf at his beloved Baltusrol.) So heavily firm is his hand upon his characters that it is doubtful if critics who call his work crude will ruffle Author Revere's equanimity.

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