Impersonal Officer

AMERICAN AGENT--Melvin H. Purvis--Doubleday, Doran ($2.75).

Inhibited by the need for keeping professional secrets from criminals, officers of the law usually write books that have all the bad features of detective stories and none of their ingenuity. By no means so pompous in his professional recollections as Sir Basil Thomson, onetime chief of Scotland Yard (The Story of Scotland Yard), Melvin Horace Purvis, onetime head of the Chicago office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, nevertheless falls into the literary ambush that has trapped so many of his predecessors, composing an account that contains two parts of philosophizing on crime to every one part of concrete information, two descriptions of plodding toil for every one of exciting capture or escape. The result is an uneven book narrowly saved from tediousness by Author Purvis' occasional candor.

It begins promisingly with a forthright description of the major fiasco in the pursuit by Federal agents of John Dillinger--the shooting at Little Bohemia, near Rhinelander, Wis. on April 22, 1934, when agents under Purvis' direction surrounded Dillinger's hiding-place and in the subsequent confusion shot three innocent men and lost one agent to the escaping gunmen. Recounting the last-minute tip that made haste necessary and bad organization inevitable, Author Purvis tells of the flight of three airplanes loaded with special agents from Chicago, of the drive to Little Bohemia in ramshackle cars, of sneaking through the woods at night, of his attempted resignation when the full proportions of the catastrophe became clear. Thereafter he adopts an impersonal tone, discourses on the duties of Federal agents, gives an unilluminating sketch of his own background, discusses the habits of gangsters and the weakness of law enforcement, retells the stories of the Factor, Bremer, Urschel and Robinson kidnappings, the deaths of Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, John Dillinger. Best parts of American Agent are its thumbnail biographies of public enemies: Verne Miller, migratory worker, parachute jumper, sergeant in the U. S. Army, who became a sheriff before he became a gangster, then posed as a wealthy oilman and joined exclusive clubs; George Ziegler, landscape engineer, University of Illinois football star, Army flyer, crack golfer and gentle, well-mannered assassin.

The Author, Born in Timmonsville, S. C. in 1903, the son of a tobacco planter, Melvin Purvis has had a more exceptional career than he makes out in his book. Slight (127 lb.), wiry, red-haired and superstitious, he studied law at the University of South Carolina, practiced for two years, went to Washington in 1927 seeking a post in the State Department, got one in the Bureau of Investigation. He chased automobile thieves in Texas and worked in Cincinnati and Oklahoma City before the Dillinger case put him in headlines. Unmarried, he collects biographies, has a pet cocker spaniel, shoots and rides for recreation. He resigned from the Bureau of Investigation last year, organized the "Melvin Purvis Junior G-Man Corps" for Post Toasties because, he says, "the training of our youth has been sadly neglected." Now living in San Francisco, he has taken the California bar examination, moves in the best social circles, plans to practice civil law.

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