Books: Dabneys (Cont'd)

TOMORROW WE REAP (384 pp.)—James Street <& James Childers—Dial ($3).

Nine years ago, James Street published the first of his series of novels of the Dabneys, Oh, Promised Land. The first book was 816 pages long, the next, Tap Roots, 593 pages, the third, By Valor and Arms, 538 pages. They told the story of

Sam and Honoria Dabney and their descendants ; how they settled in Mississippi, fought Indians, traded in slaves, cleared land, built roads, made fortunes, formed the Free State of Lebanon (in opposition to the Confederacy) during the Civil War.

Author Street's historical romances had everything that such books need: swaggering heroes, beautiful women, villainous (and noble) redskins, shocking rapes and seductions and massacres, as well as action everywhere and all the time. If readers tired of the floggings, the snakes, the brains splattered on the deck, the hussies driving strong men to distraction, they were compensated by vivid scenes, like the passage of the ironclad Arkansas through the Union fleet at Vicksburg.

Between installments of the Dabney saga, Author Street, a onetime Baptist preacher and former newspaperman, wrote a novel of contemporary Mississippi, In My Father's House, and The Gauntlet (TIME, Dec. 24, 1945), which sold 800,000 copies. In the midst of writing Tomorrow We Reap, which carries the Dabney clan beyond 1893, he bogged down, doubted that he could finish the book. Alabama-born James Childers (Laurel and Straw), an Air Force colonel in World War II and a Dabney fan, volunteered to help him. The result is unspectacular, although followers of the Dabneys will want to read it to find out what happened to the grandchildren and great-grandchildren. It is a more orderly and down-to-earth book than its predecessors, its characters more credible, its melodrama more restrained. But it is oddly less interesting for being more plausible, and less convincing for being closer to a recognizable environment. Part of the difficulty is that the plot seems to have been trimmed down to the proportions of a cinema scenario. Part of it is that the flamboyance and stage effects of the earlier books do not mix with the doings of backwoods storekeepers or squabbles over right-of-way. But the deeper trouble is that Author Street's view of history, like that of most contemporary historical novelists, does not produce much of dramatic interest when applied to events after the Civil War.