One-Sided World

STEPS GOING DOWN--John T. Mclntyre --Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50).

Pete was a pleasant-appearing, healthy, realistic Philadelphia boy who grew up in a neighborhood where he never had a chance. He spent a little time in a reform school, was mixed up in a few mild robberies, became a snappy dresser, a smooth dancer, a competent wisecracker, a good fighter who suffered the agreeable misfortune of being pursued by pretty, immoral girls who could not leave him alone. A shifty friend named Slavin got him a job in a bank, but just as Pete was beginning to get ahead, Slavin was arrested for theft.

Pete hid out so he would not weaken Slavin's case by testifying. In doing so he leaped from a warm frying pan into some of the hottest fires a contemporary romancer has imagined, was chased by his girls, the police, a large collection of double-crossing friends, including Slavin, who promptly framed him with the crime.

Last week John Thomas Mclntyre made Pete's subsequent adventures the basis of a fast moving, 504-page novel that won first place as the U. S. contender in an elaborate contest called the All-Nations Prize Novel Competition. Jointly sponsored by the Literary Guild, Warner Bros., Farrar & Rinehart and publishers in eleven countries, the All-Nations' prize is to be awarded after an international elimination contest. As U. S. contender, Author Mclntyre wins $4,000; if he wins the All-Nations' prize he gets $19,000. Steps Going Down is a lively and frequently amusing book in its own right, but scarcely of the stuff of which international literary reputations are built.

Its plot, so intricate that a good deal of the interest lies in following Author Mclntyre's ingenious unwinding of the threads, moves at the pace of popcorn popping over a hot fire. When Pete hid in a secluded rooming house, he found another fugitive there. This pickpocket, when caught with a roll of stolen bills, dropped it in Pete's lap. When he returned for it, after the police released him, Pete poked him in the nose, kept the money. He thereby added another enemy to the horde interested in seeing him captured. When Pete found favor in the cold blue eyes of Thelma, a restaurant hostess, new worries beset him: Thelma loved to manage people, and thought she knew how to get him out of his mess. She tried to do so primarily by confiding in stool pigeons. Pete learned that her best friend was an ex-street-walker with whom he had once lived, and jealousy gave him the worst headache of all.

As this mix-up got under way, the shadowy dwellers of the underworld began to appear. Misshapen, grotesque, these subterranean beings range from a philosophic ink salesman to thieves, ham actors, pool sharks, narcotic addicts, bartenders, shyster lawyers, all alike in their casual disloyalty, bitter humor, and command of tough talk. Pete faces a villainous environment with all the breezy self-confidence of the hero of a James Cagney melodrama, eventually licks it. But readers are likely to find Author Mclntyre's picture of the Philadelphia underworld too one-sided to be credible, and Pete's final triumph too neat to be true.

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