Books: Jig on the Trap

THE QUARE FELLOW (86 pp.)—Brendan Behan—Grove Press (clothbound $2.75; paperbound $1.25).

REFLECTIONS ON HANGING (231 pp.)—Arthur Koestler—Macmillan ($4.50).

There are those to whom the scaffold is a pulpit and those to whom it is the stage for a ghoulish Punch-and-Judy show. One of the pulpiteers is Britain's ex-Hungarian, ex-Communist Arthur Koestler, whose brilliant contribution to the campaign for the abolition of hanging in Britain has been published in the U.S. To Koestler (who languished for months under sentence of death in a Franco prison), hanging is no joke. To Dublin's Brendan Behan it can...