Cause Celebre

Cause Celebre

THE PARADINE CASE--Robert Hichens -- Doubleday, Doran ($2.50)

Were Greta Garbo to marry a blind War hero and thereafter be arrested on suspicion of having murdered him, the account of her trial would certainly be front-paged. It would give the Press hysterics if: 1) her defense counsel, the greatest criminal lawyer of his day, were to become desperately enamoured of her; 2) the presiding judge were a sadist and notorious lecher.

No cinema star, Mrs. Paradine did not become a public character, the talk of London, until she was accused of poisoning blind Colonel Paradine, V. C. But like Garbo she was glamorous, passionate, enigmatic--a femme fatale. She complicated life unbearably enough for her lawyer Sir Malcolm Keane, hitherto a devoted husband, without having his young wife Gay antagonize Judge Horfield by squelching his lickerish advances. And again like Garbo, Mrs. Paradine was of humble Scandinavian birth, had once worked in a barber shop. So there had been no insuperable barrier between her and her husband's valet, handsome William Marsh. Everything might have gone along smoothly, since Colonel Paradine was blind, if Marsh, his Wartime batman, had not been so fanatically loyal to him.

You may buy your copy of The Paradine Case fresh from the bookstore but there will be times when you will think you must have dug it out of the attic. Novelists nowadays usually let the reader get acquainted with their characters gradually, naturally, by seeing and hearing them in action. Author Robert Smythe Hichens, 68, who wrote his first novel, The Coastguard's Secret, in 1881 and his most popular one, The Garden of Allah, in 1905, likes to lay his puppets in a row, dissect them body & soul in advance. In The Paradine Case he takes most of 332 prolix pages for this job. But the reader who gets through these may feel repaid by some 200 pages about the trial itself, mostly swift, naked, exciting questions & answers.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.