THE SLING AND THE ARROW

From earlier historical novels, to They Sought for Paradise (Harper, 1939) and Spring 1940 (Doubleday, 1941) which were markedly concerned with physical love, this preoccupation maturates here in a full blown novel of sexual perversion, and doesn't miss a chance to fictionalize- feverishly- psychosexual performance. This is the story of Herbert Dawes, California dress designer, who unconsciously tries to kill his wife, Lonna, and is revealed to be a latent homosexual, and whose split personality-half- male- half female- leads him through a fairly tortured pursuit of a chippie (voyeurism here), to nervous hysteria and the crippling of an arm, to his taking up of a woman's work, and finally to his murder of Lonna, his attempt to escape disguised in woman's clothes... A sensational exploitation of scientific case history material, this is unnecessary.