Books: Current & Various: Oct. 22, 1965

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MARILYN, THE TRAGIC VENUS by Edwin P. Hoyt. 279 pages. Duell, Sloan & Pearce. $5.95.

Not again! Yes, again the booming Monroe industry has brought forth a book about the star-crossed star. This one, for a change, is quite well written, but Biographer Edwin Hoyt (The Vanderbilts and Their Fortunes) tells the same sick story everybody tells: bastard birth, maternal insanity, preschool rape, foster-family neglect, casting-couch apprenticeship, fanny-flipping fame, dismal marriages, barbiturate addiction, overdosed death. And he reaches the same solemn conclusion: Marilyn was the "innocent" victim of a corrupt society. Now really.

LAUGHING WHITEFISH by Robert Traver. 312 pages. McGraw-Hill. $5.50.

"The law," says former Michigan Supreme Court Justice John Voelker, "is the ledger in which are recorded our deepest tribal memories." Justice Voelker extracted a bloody page and, under the pseudonym of Robert Traver, translated it into Anatomy of a Murder. In his current novel, set in Michigan's rugged Upper Peninsula in the 1870s, he tells the faintly fictionalized story of a Chippewa Indian girl named Laughing Whitefish, whose ignorant, much-married father has been bilked of a fortune by a powerful iron-mining corporation. An idealistic, inexperienced young lawyer undertakes to sue for her inheritance and, incidentally, to establish her legitimacy. At the end squaw gets fortune and lawyer gets squaw. As a regional novel, Whitefish lacks flavor. As a character study it is inept. But as courtroom melodrama it makes intriguing legal legerdemain.

THE NIGHTCLERK by Stephen Schneck. 206 pages. Grove. $4.95.

J. Spenser Blight is a 617-lb. night-clerk with galloping satyriasis. His wife Katy is a voluptuous nymphomaniac whose specialty is catering to men with sexual fetishes. Cool camp? Not really. Unrefrigerated tripe.

THE CONSORT by Anthony Heckstall-Smith. 181 pages. Grove. $4.50.

"Should they really have banned this story?" asks the book jacket. Well, nobody really did. After printing several thousand copies of this ribald and frisky little fantasy of royal family life, the British publishers accepted the anguished advice of their barristers and chickened out.

Although Author Heckstall-Smith halfheartedly twists a few facts, there is never any doubt about who his consort is meant to be. After all, how many royal consorts are there who are handsome and charming, notoriously impatient with stuffy protocol, and married to serious-minded queens who love horses and receive government documents in red dispatch boxes? If there was any doubt, the publishers archly turned out the book with two jackets, the outer showing the consort with his queen in full British-style ceremonial robes, the inner replacing the queen with a lush brown maiden.