Knock on Any Door

$3.00

SINCE much of Willard Motley’s study of Nick Romano, who began as an altar boy and ended in the electric chair, is just its good as the publishers claim it is, it seems best to dispose at once of the book’s weaknesses. The opening section is slow, a methodical case history of juvenile mischief leading inevitably to the reform school, which corrupts instead of reforming; and because this subject has been covered time and again in the past dozen years, these chapters have an effect of repetitiousness. Through most of the book, Mr. Motley reports Nick’s adventures with no change of emphasis or pace. The women characters are all stereotypes. The author occasionally wobbles into sentimentality.

What remains, when these matters have been dutifully pointed out, is a truly remarkable first novel. Soberly, conscientiously, Mr. Motley documents the development of a criminal. It would be more accurate, perhaps, to say the development of a boy who is executed for shooting a policeman, for Nick has little conscious desire to be a criminal, and less talent for it. The background of Nick’s tragedy is built up out of small bits and scenes which gradually knit together into an almost unbearably convincing picture of slum life. The people who drift across Nick’s path are presented in the same way. They appear first as names, or faces passed in a crowded street, but with each reappearance they gain in solidity.

Nick Romano’s life follows the classic pattern of the smalltime, inefficient, adolescent lawbreaker. He is the son of hard-working but rather unsympathetic parents, who look upon Nick’s adoption of bad companions as merely another nuisance added to the horrors of the family’s sudden poverty. From stealing food because he is hungry, Nick progresses to further petty thievery, and is finally sent to reform school for something that he has not. in fact, done. The brutality and monotony of reform school life turn Nick into an implacable enemy of all civil authority.

When his family moves to Chicago, Nick begins operating in a bigger, better, and much tougher slum. At sixteen he is a finished little hoodlum, thief, mugger, and gambler, with a police record and an addiction to alcohol. Except for a brief and disastrous marriage which inspires him to even briefer attempts at reform, Nick is essentially unchanged when he is convicted, at twenty-one, of murdering a veteran cop named Riley.

Two thirds of Mr. Motley’s book describes the way in which a clumsy, careless, impersonal society converts a nice little kid named Nick into a killer called “Pretty Rov Romano.”The last third of the book shows this same society gathering its weapons in pious rage to take a highly personal revenge on Nick Romano. Mr. Motley does no preaching, but the indictment is inescapable.

Despite its occasional slowness, despite the prevalence of episodes that one has certainly met before somewhere, Knock on Any Door compels the reader’s attention by its honesty, its thoroughness, its concern for the people who appear in its pages. And when Mr. Motley gets to Nick’s trial, he has no need to compel attention. It will be readily given, for his description of the legal and intellectual battle waged in the courtroom is as exciting, and as full of suspense, as the best cloak-and-sword melodrama ever written.

Knock on Any Door is primarily a social novel, but Air. Alotley has contrived to do what social novelists so often miss. He has created a complete, self-contained, absolutely convincing world.

PHOEBE LOU ADAMS