Scarlet Splash

THE VIXENS (347 pp.)--Frank Yerby--Dial ($2.75).

As drugstore fiction, this novel fills an even simpler prescription than its profitable predecessor, The Foxes of Harrow (which stayed triumphantly high on the best-seller lists for more than a year, was sold to 20th Century-Fox and grossed Au thor Frank Yerby something like $250,000). The hero of The Vixens is lean and hard; he moves with controlled grace, and he says everything softly. The girl is slim and golden, her mouth is a splash (some times a slash) of scarlet, and her perfume is faint, elusive. These two daydreams, so happily cast on any Hollywood lot or in any adolescent's bedroom, are naturally not to be frustrated by a lot of gunplay and dastardy in post-Civil War New Or leans.

Determined to give full value, the au thor has trimmed his sexy romance with conscientious trappings of history. The action runs from 1866 to 1874 and is bound up with the bloody struggle in Louisiana between Negro freedmen, corrupt carpetbaggers and diehard slave owners. The leading figures are exquisite: evil Hugh Duncan, who employs the terrorist Knights of the White Camellia, and Laird Fournois, masterful friend of the black men.

In a moment of misguided calculation, Laird marries Hugh's cousin Sabrina and tries to forget his passion for the golden-skinned Denise. This turns out to be un necessary for Sabrina conveniently goes crazy. But Hugh, too, has noted the tiger ish Denise, and Laird has to defend him self against various attempts at assassina tion, including one by a whole troop of Klansmen. Meanwhile he rebuilds the old Fournois estate and goes to the legislature on the vote of his Negro constituents. But he finds Reconstruction politics too hopelessly corrupt to play. In the end he loses all--except Denise.

Vulgarity at the level of The Vixens has a polish that almost absolves it; literary standards are irrelevant to its high sheen and jet propulsion. What gives The Vixens special interest is the fact that its author is the first Negro to make an unqualified success in the slick-writing field. The publishers neither conceal nor exploit this fact: their publicity refers to 31-year-old Frank Yerby as a man who taught English at Florida A. & M. College and Southern University, La., leaves it up to the reader to know that they are Negro colleges.

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