Crime of Passion

FOLLOW ME DOWN (271 pp.)--Shelby Foote--Dial ($3).

At first the case seemed a mere formality. Luther Eustis, a sternly God-fearing farmer of middle age, had confessed the murder of Beulah Ross, the sexy teenager who ran away with him for an illicit two-week idyll. But when Parker Nowell took Farmer Eustis' case, that changed matters a bit. Lawyer Nowell was a sour misogynist but he was also a brilliant courtroom tactician who "never took a case unless it was hopeless, and it was a long way from hopeless" when he did.

This taut little novel takes a sharp look at one of the oldest problems in literature: the origins and consequences of a crime of passion. Like Theodore Dreiser in An American Tragedy, though on a far more modest scale, Novelist Foote has tried to find out and explain why a peaceable, inoffensive man can sometimes be driven to murder. He has set his story in his native Mississippi among the poor-white farmers and the small-town characters he intimately knows.

"That Little Gold Chain." As Lawyer Nowell begins peeling back the outer layers of his client's story, he soon uncovers the sources of Luther Eustis' tragedy. His was a life dominated by gnawing fears and nagging frustrations. As a child, Luther had watched his father destroy himself after learning of his wife's infidelity. As a man, he had found joy neither in his scraggly wife nor his children, one of them an idiot. Only in revivalist religion did he find any outlet for his cramped, unexercised emotions.

And then Eustis met saucy Beulah, who "was like the wicked ones the Prophets roared against: wore her clothes the way they did, and had that little gold chain on her ankle; walked the way they must have done, hip bones loose in their sockets, the bottom part of her stomach held well forward . . ." Eustis prayed mightily but he found Beulah impossible to resist.

With relish, Lawyer Nowell started digging into Beulah's background. He made Beulah's whimpering mother tell how she had taken her daughter to juke joints at the age of 13, using her as a stalking-horse for men. Beulah had never known that love could mean happiness. For her it was only the assortment of men--big or little, decent or nasty--that her mother picked up. But nevertheless she thought her mother was kind: "For one thing, she only turned the nicest ones over to me, the businessmen."

"I Have to Go Back." For their first few days together, Beulah and Luther found in each other everything both had missed in life. But then the farmer began to read his Bible again and to see visions of his wife and children. "I have to go back," he said. When Beulah refused to let him go, Eustis killed her.

Spinning out his story in a series of flashback monologues, Novelist Foote has a keen eye for the drama of a small-town courtroom in the South and an unmistakable talent for reporting the impact of human passion on the spectators' dull, ordered lives. All that keeps him from writing a really first-class novel is an unfortunate tendency to borrow overmuch from the verbal mannerisms of Neighbor William Faulkner. But there is nothing wrong with Novelist Foote that a little more literary independence cannot cure.

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