THE CENSOR MARCHES ON—Morris L Ernst & Alexander Lindey—Doubleday, Doran ($2.50). A sharp, clattering, rather witty account, in the best liberal-lawyer-to-laymen manner, of what U. S. sex censorship amounts to in its several fields. Nothing startlingly new is said on this sore old subject. The authors bring all the more famous court fights, raids, enlightened opinions and funny stories between two covers. The book also outlines just what can, to date, be legally got away with; and gives in full the anthropologically fascinating, immortally funny Production Code for the movies. The volume may be useful as a sort of Scouts' Handbook for liberals.
HELL ON TRIAL—René Belbenoif—Dutton ($3). No Dreyfus, but an exceedingly tenacious gadfly, the famed fugitive of Devil's Island (Dry Guillotine) here adds further smelly details about life in the French penal colony. He also deals with allegedly innocent fellow convicts. Typical is Chariot Pain. His crime was setting fire to a $5 army tent during a sun-struck moment in Africa. Legally amnestied by French law in 1925, he is still at Devil's Island, 32 years after his original sentence. But not all Belbenoit's fellow convicts were such martyrs. From their fugitive ranks, for example, was recruited the international white-slave ring, operating chiefly in South America, which the League of Nations felt obliged to investigate in 1932.
With best-seller and lecture profits, Author Belbenoit a year ago bought a house on Long Island, married an American, increased his weight from 97 to his normal 110 lbs. But last week, defeated in his fight to win U. S. asylum, he was again a fugitive, somewhere in Central America.
LOVE IN THE SUN—Leo Walmsley— Doubleday, Doran ($2.50). A girl named Dain, and "I," a young man, unmarried, without money, in love, take a shack and shift for themselves on the Cornish coast. The young man writes books, from which he gets too little money; the young woman works very hard and is very "gallant." The arduous simplicities of their living and their small adventures are described in great detail; they have a baby; they are very happy indeed. Warm readers will find the tale disarming; cool readers may wonder whether love so nearly cloudless is interesting enough to write or read about. It may, however, forerun a wartime wave of back-to-the-bed "escape" novels.
HAMLET HAD AN UNCLE—Branch Cabell—Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50). Author Cabell's Hamlet is the purported original of Shakespeare's, as found in assorted Viking sagas. Like the Melancholy Dane, the Viking of Jutland poses as insane (only more so), murders his stepfather. But the Viking Hamlet was big, blond and extrovert. He did not see his father's ghost. He killed not only his stepfather, but all his stepfather's courtiers. He married a guileless English princess, abandoned her for a bloodthirsty, hawknosed hank of hair, thereby starting a sequence of murders which ends only when his Amazon has his head chopped off.
Author Cabell claims credit for at least sticking closer to the original story than Shakespeare did. He certainly sticks closer to Cabell than to the Vikings. Like his score-odd previous tales (Jurgen, et al.), the trade-mark of Hamlet Had an Uncle is arch pedantry, medieval rhetoric, amorous innuendo.