Books: Lifer

MUSEUM—James L. Phelan—Morrow ($2.50).

At the edge of a desolate section of fog-ridden moors, the grey, ancient English prison of Bleakmore was almost impregnable, had harbored so many generations of convicts that it smelled "of the primal basic filth of old humanity, of the things forgotten when the oldest cities began." Although fogs sometimes came down while convicts were working in the quarries and on the moors (blotting out the prison road in an hour), convicts who escaped under cover of it were easily caught because all outlets were guarded. When a young convict asked, "What's the chances for a stoppo [jailbreak]...

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