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Yerby never lacks for story ideas. "I have always started a new novel before I finished the last," he says. When his publishers ask for changes, likely as not he will write them a completely different version in four or five weeks. He writes so fast that a manuscript reportedly reached the editors with a notation for a scene still unwritten: "Hop into bed comes here."
In his new novel, Benton's Row (Dial; $3.50), Yerby has returned to his old Louisiana stamping grounds. Big, bad Tom Benton outgallops a posse into the arms of a preacher's wife by page 7, and thereafter Bentons, legitimate and illegitimate, brawl, seduce, spawn, cheat and die in comic-book profusion. Having caught his daughter Stormy bedded down with a neighbor boy, the big bad man takes a mule skinner's whip to her: "Fire exploded behind Tom Benton's eyes. A black hood closed down over his head. He brought the whip whining whistling down, not even hearing the sick, wet smashing sound it made biting into her ... He picked her up. She lolled in his arms like a rag doll, limp and boneless . . . 'Here,' he said harshly [to his wife], 'take your daughter.' "
After drowning his sorrows in drink, Tom Benton wakes up in a New Orleans bawdyhouse, returns home to be knifed by an outraged father; Stormy becomes a well-kept woman, finally marries an aging millionaire Yankee. Already chosen by the Dollar Book Club, Yerby's ninth novel should win him his ninth jackpot.
Says Yerby: "I write to please the widest possible audience." All great writers, he feels, have done that.