BY PHOEBE ADAMS
Although the case of the eleven throttled women remains officially unsettled, GEROLD FRANK, a journalist best known as the co-author of various Hollywood autobiographies, has succeeded in writing and publishing THIS BOSTON STRANGLER (New American Library, $5.95). In this book, Mr. Frank describes the whole police investigation of the bizarre murders, reveals the identity of the killer, and quotes lavishly from the man’s own description, which was never an official confession to the police, of his acts. It is not made clear for what reason, or on whose authority, Mr. Frank was given information withheld from the local press, nor how he achieved access to admissions which the murderer and his lawyer took great pains to restrict, at the time, to a hearer who could not be dragged into court to testily about the matter. What complications this book will cause if, as is admittedly unlikely, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts ever tries the fellow for murder, one can only guess at with dismay. Simply as reading, The Boston Strangler is as fascinating as any contrived murder mystery, for Mr. Frank has made good use of the comic irrelevancies, enticing blind alleys, suspicious coincidences, and attractive red herrings with which the case abounded. He lapses at times into melodramatic overstatement, and old Bostonians will observe that his knowledge of certain district boundary lines is shaky, but these are small faults in what is on the whole a coherent and exciting narrative. Two interesting points emerge from the story more or less by accident. One is the helpless bafflement of a police force required to locate a person who kills utter strangers for no practical motive. The other is the folly of speculative psychoanalysis. At the height of the turmoil, Attorney General Edward Brooke, Jr., established a special commission on the strangling investigation, with a committee of psychologists composed partly of experienced officials, partly of private practitioners. These well-qualified gentlemen studied the crimes and worked out a generalized description of the killer’s temperament and habits. It proved to be almost totally mistaken, not because the committee members were stupid, but because of one little piece of information which was not available to anybody but the murderer.
The study of philosophy combined with a passion for workable trinkets has led ROBERT S. BRUMBAUGH to examine ANCIENT GREEK GADGETS AND MACHINES (CrOWell, $4.95). “There was,” he reports, “a great deal more scientific apparatus in ancient Greece than we have ever supposed.” There was also a great proliferation of mechanical toys, automata, labor-saving devices concocted mostly by temple priests (“the first western use of coin operated slot machines was to sell holy water”), and gismos to prevent larceny and rigged elections. “One of the central questions left us by Greek philosophy is: ‘Can virtue be taught?’ We still don’t know the answer. Another question we are trying to solve first leaves its traces in the markets and courts of ancient Greece: ‘Can dishonesty be prevented by foolproof machinery?' ” The answer to the last one, I suspect, is that no foolproof anti-dishonesty machinery has yet been invented because the problem does not fall into any of the areas from which Mr. Brumbaugh thinks invention comes — that is, necessity, laziness, and leisure.
EDWARD GOREY’S THE GILDED BAT (Simon and Schuster, $3.00) records the career of Mirella Splatova, née Maudie Splaytoes, “the reigning ballerina of the age.” The age, to judge by Mr. Gorey’s sentimentally sinister, mordantly funny drawings, is 1900 to 1928, and the fashions of the period are skewered as mercilessly as the legend of Russian ballet.
The autobiography that Louis MACNEICE never finished has been tinkered together by his literary executor, E. R. Dodds, and appears as THE STRINGS ARE FALSE (Oxford University Press, $6.00). So many poetical memoirs have bewailed the horrors of the English public school that it is refreshing to find MacNeice admitting, a bit sheepishly, that he enjoyed the playing fields and found Oxford tiresomely queer. He later describes a dog show as “a wonderland of non-utilitarian growths.” Brilliance and unexpectedness are scattered thinly, however, through a text that actually tells surprisingly little about the author or his times.