Books: Murder Therapy

• Share

DANGER SIGNAL — Phyllis Bottome —Little, Brown ($2.50).

Suppose you were plumped down in a big foreign city, and there you met a redheaded, respectable-looking girl who disclosed that she was all set to murder her faithless lover. Could you prevent the murder—without resort to police, intimidation, hypnosis or miracles?

The way to do it is revealed in Phyllis Bottome's Danger Signal. As in her Private Worlds (1934), Phyllis Bottome's latest prospective best-seller works everything out by Individual Psychology—the theory of the late Dr. Alfred Adler, inventor of the "Inferiority Complex," Freud's onetime colleague and greatest rival.

Practically applied in Danger Signal, the Adler-Bottome theory cross-fertilizes the problem novel and the detective story. In a bloodless climax the heroine psychologist (a Czech lecturing in London) extracts inferiority complexes and egocentricities like a dentist tweaking out a rotten tooth. Author Bottome patently exaggerates the omniscience of the psychologist, the tractability of her patients, shows that a novel about psychology and a good psychological novel are by no means the same thing.