Tough Stuff

BRAIN GUY-Benjamin Appel-Knopf ($2.50).

The racketeer, first introduced into U. S. fiction in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925). now looms large among U. S. villain-heroes. In the cinema he is still sentimentalized into a fiend or a Robin Hood, but in novels, which can afford to be more factual, he is beginning to appear in all three dimensions. Such a three-dimensional portrait of a racketeer is Brain Guy. A more honest and complete picture than The Postman Always Rings Twice (TIME, Feb. 19), it is written with lengthier brutality, will shock readers who dislike unpleasant subjects, but will entrance those who prefer violent realism.

Bill Trent was a rent-collector in downtown Manhattan. Like most of his colleagues he eked out his salary by "shaking down'' tenants whose line of business was not strictly legal. His craving for women, liquor, gambling made money his obsession. Hard up, he shook down a pimp of his acquaintance once too often, found himself the unwilling accessory at a murder. He lost his job, tried desperately to chisel in on some steady racket. Rent-collecting among small shopkeepers had given him valuable information about when and where they kept their money. Soon he was ''the brain guy" for a small gang of robbers. But Bill was no thoughtless criminal and his conscience and his fears died hard. As he got deeper into the meshes of a career in which life and success went ever more narrowly together, his increasing desperation gave him a boldness his brain told him would be his finish. Author Appel leaves him balancing on a precarious success, with his story heading swiftly to its inevitable end.

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