Arizona Hemingway

BOOM TOWN--Jack O'Connor--Knopf ($2.50).

When Ernest Hemingway created his monosyllabic prize fighters, gangsters, bull fighters, he gave U. S. writers a powerful insight into the workings of the minds of criminals, fighting men and tough characters in general. Imitators who borrowed his peculiar style soon burned themselves out, but the full impact of Hemingway's major achievement is just beginning to make itself felt in U. S. fiction. Last week a young Arizona novelist showed what happens when the legendary heroes of the Old West--men of the cast of Wyatt Earp or Doc Holliday--are examined with an understanding gained from Hemingway's studies of later desperadoes. They emerge as quick on the trigger as ever, but hard-up instead of heroic, dissatisfied, bewildered, trapped. Although they start shooting at the hint of an insult, they, too, eat dirt, have their human share of humiliations in the pursuit of women and wealth.

Peopled with the stock characters of a Western thriller, Boom Town is notable for this realistic picture of its gunmen. The story revolves around Frank O'Rielly, who stumbles on a silver mine, exploits it with a young Eastern assayer, gets rich, falls in love with his partner's wife. Knocking down too many braggarts and bullies to be quite real, O'Rielly is, nevertheless, an interesting sketch, although hardly more; he is too intelligent to fit into the brutal, amoral environment in which he lives, but even more contemptuous of the world of bankers and speculators into which his wealth lifts him.

Author O'Connor writes in a bold, colloquial, summarizing prose, with paragraphs trailing off into dull anticlimaxes ("When he got so he couldn't stand it any longer he'd go into Phoenix and get blind-leaping drunk and spend too much dough and make a fool out of himself"). Inadequate for detailing such complex figures, as O'Rielly, this style works well in accounting for dumb, dangerous Bill Crockett, who develops from a cowboy to a highwayman, but can never understand why his companions grin knowingly or sigh wearily when he talks about all the women he has known and all the men he has killed.

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