THE STREET OF THE THREE FRIENDS

An unhurried narrative of private lives, shadowed by the curious coincidence of death, fills in the past of Emily Ford and Blanche Stevenson- childhood friends- and Al McAllister, a hunchback, who shares their house in Paris. Ward Hammond, a professor on vacation, tells their story as it is told to him by the three friends who include him in their close circle and provide him with more than material for a book. For Blanche, whose charm is premeditated, there was the success- as a singer- for which McAllister had groomed her; but there was also a first marriage to a trumpeter who was an addict, a second marriage to a millionaire youngster, and the termination of each in an accidental death which had been stigmatized as suicide. For the more disarming Emily, with whom Hammond now falls in love, there was a first marriage of wealth which had ended in divorce; two marriages to older men, who had died, as did her only son; and once again the intervention of death when she plans to marry another man- not Hammond- who then defies superstition to share a speculative future with her.... A popularly amplified and accessorized drama of lives lived fully rather than well- and scarred by strange circumstance- this is an easily popular choice for rent and some sales and more likely to succeed than his recent books.