No, this isn't another Anatomy of a Murder: the psychology and law are a bit too undigested here, the central mystery is a little too easy to guess, and much of the stagy, folksy dialogue is awfully dated. But Traver remains a master of low-key courtroom drama, and most of this unpretentious murder-trial novel is genially readable. The narrator is trout-fishing Michigan lawyer Frederick Ludlow, who's been hired to defend young Randall Kirk—accused of murdering (by drowning) lovely Mrs. Constance Spurrier, with whom he was having a longtime affair. The problem, however, is that sullen Randy claims to have no memory of the time surrounding the murder! Furthermore, he seems to forget even more while in jail. So Ludlow, with help from retired Dr. Hugh Salter, wants to get court permission to use hypnotism to recall Randy's memory: there's a pre-trial hearing on the subject, a mini-history of hypnotism, and a Ludlow victory. But Randy seems oddly resistant to hypnosis—and Dr. Hugh gently persists while the trial begins, with heaps of evidence against the defendant. Meanwhile, the issue focus moves to the question of "impaired consciousness" as a defense to a crime (was Randy sleepwalking or something when—if—he did it?); and though this isn't quite as interesting as the "irresistible impulse" question in Anatomy of a Murder, Traver pursues the legal precedents at length. And finally, the doc's hypnosis having succeeded at last, Randy remembers all and takes the stand, detailing how he was in fact programmed into killing his beloved Constance—by the most likely suspect. This windup twist is far from new to mystery fiction (it goes at least as far back as Wilkie Collins), but Traver documents it more seriously and authentically than most. And for those who don't mind the creakiness here—likable Ludlow's wheezy humor, the chunks of technical exposition, or some truly unreal conversational outbursts from 28-year-old Randy ("How can mere clumsy words ever tell the state of enchantment, of suspended ecstasy and bliss, that came over me when we two were together")—this is a nice old-fashioned read, with special appeal to hypnotism buffs and armchair lawyers.
Pub Date: Oct. 20, 1981
ISBN: 0312600062
Page Count: 298
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1981
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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