Killer in Cresap's Landing

THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (273 pp.]--Davis Grubb--Harper ($3).

Hing, hang, hung!

See what the hangman done;

Hung, hang, king!

See the robber swing . . .

All the kids in the Ohio River town of Cresap's Landing sing that song except John and Pearl Harper. And they have reason: their bank-robbing father is in Moundsville Prison waiting to be hanged. Before The Night of the Hunter has gone many pages, Ben Harper lives out the doggerel and swings for his crimes. The secret and, eventually, the terror around which Author Grubb's skin-prickling first novel unfolds is: What did Ben Harper do with the $10,000 in crisp, green 100s that he killed two bank clerks to get?

The police, his lawyer and his wife all fail to wheedle the hiding place from doomed Ben. Village gossip holds that Harper threw it into the Ohio just before the police closed in. But a man who has a different idea is Ben's old cellmate, "the Preacher." The Preacher is a pathological killer and a religious fanatic, a kind of evangelistic Bluebeard who murders widows for their mite, but has been caught, so far, only for stealing a car. And before he dies, Ben Harper, mumbling in his sleep, gives the Preacher a hint: "And a little child shall lead them."

Pearl Harper is barely five; too young to know more than that her rag doll is stuffed with green paper. John is nine; he knows what the paper is, and has sworn to his dad, just before the capture, not to give away the secret.

It seems safe enough until the Preacher comes to Cresap's Landing. In no time he woos and wins the widow Harper. John shows an animal distrust for this strange new father with the letters L-O-V-E tattooed on the fingers of his right hand and H-A-T-E on the left. Once the war of nerves is joined, Author Grubb piles horror on tension, chapter by chapter, till the Preacher meets an end as vicious as himself.

The Night of the Hunter has some of the tension of Marie Belloc Lowndes' famed story of a psychopathic killer, The Lodger, plus a sequence of runaway river life that recalls the Injun Joe passages of Mark Twain. Davis Grubb, 34, was himself born in Moundsville, W. Va., and named after a grandfather who captained a steamboat on the Ohio. Next for Author Grubb's story: a film version by Producer Paul Gregory (Don Juan in Hell, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial), with Charles Laughton directing.

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