Harmless Herbert

THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT (280 pp.) --Edgar Mittelholzer--John Day ($3).

"Conditions seem favorable for a seance this evening," said Herbert Jarrow. And before long, he was in the middle of it; he was chanting a garbled version of the witches' incantations from Macbeth. Tapping Herbert's clasped hands, his daughter Grace whispered: "Mother is here. She has emerged from the Gloom." Mother Jarrow toddled in from the kitchen of their English cottage. "I am here, Herbert," she said, "I'm always near you, Herbert." :'But in a different world," insisted Herbert, "you died and I went mad."

Mad old Herbert Jarrow is the hero of Author Edgar Mittelholzer's serio-comic melodrama, The Weather in Middenshot. Until he breaks the back of his new novel with a "message," Author Mittelholzer keeps it jumping with the same comic-sardonic flair that made Shadows Move Among Them (TIME, Sept. 17, 1951) an ingaging satire of a British Guiana Utopia.

Though he eats her cooking daily, Herbert is convinced that his wife has been dead for 17 years, and pays her no notice except for her weekly resurrection at seances. His mousy womenfolk humor him and blame it all on a lorry smashup. The drone of an airplane sends him into whimpering hysterics. Even more trying to plain-as-rain Grace is her loony father's mirking assumption that mild Mr. Holme, the staid widower and pensioned policeman who lives down the street, is an "old bull" bent on seducing her.

Herbert strains the budding romance by planting dead cats on the widower's doorstep with tags addressed to "Old Runt" and "Old Weasel." When such shenanigans pall, Herbert has his daughter read to him about Nazi atrocities at Belsen. "Lunatics are all about us," he warns her.

His warning comes true one late autumn day, when a pathological killer gets loose in Middenshot. With balmy cunning, Herbert lures him and a Middenshot rapist to the coal shed on the pretext of helping them evade the police, and shoots a hypodermic of hydrocyanic acid into each. Before anyone has a chance to discover Herbert's private executions, he and a pair of philosophical detectives have more than enough time to labor Author Mittelholzer's pet thesis, i.e., criminals are born, not made. His further contention: eugenics experts should be given the job of blotting out young Hitlers. Stalins and criminal misfits before they grow old enough to trouble the world. Whether this is a good idea or not, Herbert's personal blottings shock him back to sanity.

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