Books: Hunter of Saurians

CROCODILE FEVER (293 pp.)—Lawrence Earl—Knopf ($3.95).

Canada-born Lawrence Earl is a good storyteller (Yangtze Incident, TIME, July 23. 1951) with a weakness for pretty prose. To Earl, a woman's waist is a "sweet, inward curve," and a hunk of driftwood can be "ductile to the heaving flood." So when Earl ran into an African crocodile-hunter named Bryan Herbert Dempster, he noted that 28-year-old Hunter Dempster had a "hard challenge in his bright, sapphire eyes [that] had come of something more peremptory than time." But Author Earl picked up a good story.

Dempster was trying...