Hands Across the Sea

BEYOND THIS PLACE (316 pp.)--A. J. Cronin--Little, Brown ($3.75).

When Ulsterman Paul Burgess asked his mother to show him his birth certificate, she only hemmed & hawed. When Paul persisted, she sagged at the knees, confessed that his real surname was Mathry and that his "dead" father was actually serving a life sentence for killing a prostitute. Paul was stunned: he remembered his pa as a jolly fellow who cut paper boats, not ladies' throats. Afire to clear the old man, Paul hotfooted it to the English industrial town of Wortley, the scene of the crime.

So begins A. J. Cronin's new novel, the Literary Guild selection for August, which might be described as a bull-headed attack on the British judicial system, except that bulls have hard heads and definite ideas while Beyond This Place is something of a two-headed calf.

Author Cronin's British memories seem to have got confused by his 14 years of residence in the U.S., so that his book is like a game of baseball played by somebody who thinks it is cricket. The villain of the novel, Sir Matthew Sprott, prosecutor for the Crown, can be best described as a go-getting U.S. district attorney with a knighthood. Wortley's police chief is another odd case of hands across the sea, one of those blunt Britons of the old Prohibition gang-war days. As for Wortley's newspapermen, nothing like them has been seen in the North Country since The Front Page came to the local flickers.

Not surprisingly, Paul Mathry finds the Cronin blend of American ruthlessness and British hypocrisy a tough obstacle in the way of justice. No matter where he scoots, digging up new evidence to free his father, the cops and the judiciary are forever on his tail, eager to bury the nasty stuff again. But Ulster's Paul fights on with true U.S. idealism, until at last he proves that the murder was committed by a well-known Wortley philanthropist and that Sir Matthew Sprott got the conviction of father Mathry simply to feather his own nest.

The love interest of Beyond This Place is furnished by a girl of Swedish descent named Lena. The town of Wortley doesn't think much of Lena and her cool "northern freshness," but she is definitely a blonde of whom Minnesota would be proud.

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