BOOKS*

Old Tea Leaves, Stirred

A NEW YORK TEMPEST--Manuel Komroff--Coward-McCann. On April 12, 1836, Manhattan had something to talk about. Pretty Courtesan Ellen Jewett was found strangled in her room. Circumstantial evidence glared at one Robinson, young man-about-town. Editor James Gordon Bennett himself covered the story for his New York Herald. Author Komroff, changing the names of his protagonists to Oliver Benson and Jane Holden, follows closely the history of the case, but takes it further, deeper than Editor Bennett did. Jane, like many a storybook harlot, was pathological only in having a heart of gold. She gave Benson her true love. For a while he liked it. Unfortunately he was a black-hearted villain, with ambitions toward a respectable marriage. Since Jane threatened to be an embarrassing liability he decided to liquidate her. Benson was quickly arrested and the affair would have gone hard with him had not District Attorney Welden made an enemy of able, weasly Lawyer Hopkinson. The latter, hoping to discredit the District Attorney, took Benson's case, presented it in court as an issue between Vice and Respectability. With luck, perjured witnesses and slick manipulation Benson was acquitted. Benson might have gone unpunished to his grave had not the Furies taken a hand in hounding him. Human avengers came to his hideout too late, but had the workman-like satisfaction of chucking what was left of him into the Five Points rat-pit. Author Komroff's tale of 100-year-old Manhattan is no lavender-scented memorial, but a crude, almost reportorial narrative which lets the background take care of itself. A New York Tempest is a tale not of Manhattan's 400 (so designated circa 1889) but of its 200,000 small-town citizens, its volunteer fire brigade, its lawless Five Points where "leather-hats" (police) never dared venture, its daring real-estate ventures into the open farming country of East 52nd Street. Author Komroff lugs in few historical buried treasures to deck his dime museum. One of them: that the original Tombs prison was so called "because its plan & architecture were inspired by a picture in a popular book of the time called Stevens' Travels. The author of the book was John L. Stevens, Esq. of Hoboken, N. J., and the picture was one of a building in Thebes and because of its high walls without windows, its inward sloping lines and its severe plainness it was called a King's Tomb."/- The Author. In spite of his name Manuel Komroff is a Manhattanite (1890), Yaleman (of no degree). Having studied engineering, he earned his first pay writing music for the old Kalem cinema, then got a job as art critic. The Russian Revolution lured him to Petrograd, made him editor of the Russian Daily News, then drove him out of the country. Until critics began to hail his spare-time writing, Author Komroff survived by hack-writing for women's-wear and movie magazines. Bland, sensible, he says: "The best authors are those that are dead."

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/-New York City guidebooks explain that the Tombs, erected in 1838, "was the most perfect example of ancient Egyptian architecture outside of Egypt." Most of the original Tombs was razed. When the present prison (New York City's worst) was erected in 1898 it retained the old popular name though its architecture is totally unlike the Tombs.

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