Desert Whopper

THE DOOMSDAY MEN--J. B. Priestley --Harper ($2.50).

In Midnight on the Desert, an account of his stay in Arizona in 1936, Author Priestley presented one of the most excited and semi-mystical rhapsodies on that section that has appeared since English writers, with strange literary consequences, started wintering in the U. S. Southwest. Even the boldest guess could not have anticipated the strange desert influence that breathes from The Doomsday Men-- a lively mixture of adventure, mystery and improbabilities, free of literary significance but heavily weighted with a moral regarding the curse of social pessimism.

At a tennis tournament on the French Riviera, a fresh-minded young English architect falls in love with his partner, a beautiful, pessimistic and wholly mysterious American girl under an alias, discovers only by accident, when she has vanished, that she is the daughter of an eccentric U. S. billionaire who lives somewhere in the Southwest.

In London, a brilliant young U. S. scientist is searching for a vanished physicist, his former professor. But when he locates him, the professor denies his identity, frames his onetime protege to get him out of the way. Chief of the shady facts about the professor is that his real name is MacMichael, that he lives in a Mojave Desert hideout called Barstow.

In Los Angeles, a nervy adventurer is investigating the mysterious murder of his brother, a reporter. Clues lead dangerously to the Brotherhood of the Judgment, a fanatical sect headed by sinister Father John, whose real name is MacMichael. Sect headquarters are in Barstow. There arrive the architect, the scientist and the adventurer. During the next 187 pages, at the MacMichael desert palace, the three young men are shot at, kidnapped, finally escape an awful doom, not very much to a reader's relief.

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