Books: The Tiger Scratches

THE CAPTAIN’S TIGER (230 pp.)—Jerome Weidman—Reynal & Hitchcock ($2.75).

Jerome Weidman’s noisy talents have been devoted to proving that life in his native New York City is a rat race between the stinkers and the saps. In I Can Get It for You Wholesale and What’s In It for Me? Weidman drew a picture of the garment district so snarlingly unpleasant that his publishers for a time refused to let them be reprinted, fearing that they helped spread antiSemitism. In a collection of short stories, The Horse That Could Whistle Dixie, he boiled a whole gallery of cheap-flash characters in skunk oil. Weidman’s people were not always well drawn, but they were properly quartered.

At 34, Author Weidman has grown older, but his sympathy for his fellow man has not increased noticeably with the years. A few of the 21 stories in this collection, written between 1939 and 1947, are slick magazine products with a happy ending, but the majority appeared first in the New Yorker and wear a kind of civilized brutality. Readers will miss the garlicky locale of his earlier books, but they will feel the sting of the old Weidman venom.

Many of the tales are set in Washington, where the author spent part of the war in the OWI. They gleam with tarnished Army brass, crawl with Army wives as loose as granny knots. The Captain’s Tiger will add little to Weidman’s reputation, shows that even tough-guy fiction can be written to a formula as predictable as slick-paper romance.