Cries of New London

DULCIMER STREET (637 pp.)--Norman Collins--Duell, Sloan & Pearce ($3).

The blonde screamed: "Let me out . . . let me out!" "You shut your trap," said Percy Boon. The car sped over London's lonely, foggy Wimbledon Common, and Police Constable Lamb, leaping over the curb to safety, glimpsed the struggling couple in the front seat. A few hours later, detectives in raincoats were standing over the blonde's dead body--while Percy, hatless, bloody, hysterical, ran desperately for shelter in the myriad streets of London.

London is what Norman Collins' book is really about. Percy and his blonde are simply two of the dozen-odd principal characters used by Author Collins as a means of mapping London--south from Camden Town, north from Wapping. Absent from his map is the London that is most familiar to most tourists--the picture-postcard world in the shadow of Big Ben. Omnipresent are the vast areas few tourists ever see, and ways of life that few would associate with England.

Broadway & Old Bailey. Few British authors since the days of Charles Dickens and his disciple George Gissing have tried to do for London what numerous U.S. writers have done for New York. As a result, Dulcimer Street is likely to be an eye opener for U.S. readers. Apart from the crime he commits, Author Collins' Percy Boon is a typical young Londoner of 1939--as dedicated to intricate machinery and peroxide beauty as Americans are supposed to be. Percy's natural habitats are not the fast-disappearing pubs and winding streets of old London, but new London's numerous glittering picture palaces, dance halls, road house-type restaurants. Percy's heart belongs to Broadway, his blonde's to cash-as-cash-can.

Stealing cars, in the hope of making big money fast, leads Percy to manslaughter and the Old Bailey. All of Author Collins' characters have enough vitality to create interest and amuse, but it is the vast, murmuring world in which they live that gives Dulcimer Street its strength and character.

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