Books: Missing Chapter

Four years ago, ship-bored sailors on a U.S. transport near Samoa ran across a ravaged English thriller. Its somewhat peremptory title: Kiss the Blood Off My Hands. The high-strung, blood-&-guts story furnished so fine a busman's holiday that they dismembered it, passed it around chapter by chapter. To their horror, they found that the last two chapters had gone overboard.

Most of the men went down with their ship in the Solomons without ever resolving their suspense. But two years later, one survivor was still scouring around after those last two chapters (TIME, Nov. 20, 1944). He was out of luck unless he sent to England, where the book was published in 1940, and sold 232,000 copies.

Last week Publishers Rinehart & Co. (who had read about the sailor's trouble in TIME) satisfied his curiosity and hoped to whet a lot of other people's, by bringing out the first U.S. edition.*

In this story of thugs and trulls, enough sin and mayhem occurs (or is about to) on every page to remind U.S. readers of James M. Cain. The complete, animal innocence of its hero—a sort of Id with pants down—is funny, scary, and fascinating. But the sailor is not going to like the two missing chapters. After raising the promise of Cain for the first 207 pages, Author Butler subsides into a tea-and-marmalade finish.