The Wire-Recorder Ear

LET No MAN WRITE MY EPITAPH (467 pp.)--Willard Motley--Random House ($4.95).

Grant Holloway is a Chicago free-lance magazine writer with "ears like wire recorders." Halfway through Let No Man Write My Epitaph, he slips out of his Lake Shore apartment to sniff at the "great beast of a city" that crouches like a "blue-black panther" in the slum area beyond Chicago's North Clark Street. His socialite wife, Wanda, watches him go: "She smiled, knowing him so well. Prowling. For the story . . . She liked him that way. He should do a novel."

Grant never quite gets around to it, but his creator and prototype, Novelist Willard Motley, regrettably has. In his first, bestselling novel, Knock On Any Door (1947), Motley set out to demonstrate that the path from tenement to electric chair is paved with society's inattentions. The logic was sometimes shaky, but Motley's hoarse bellow of rage was convincing enough to make the indictment stick. In the current novel, his third, Motley stacks his evidence even higher, but he protests too much, and the bellow of rage has cracked to a querulous whimper.

The story chiefly concerns the bastard son of Nick Romano, the young Chicago gangster who walked to the chair in Knock On Any Door. Like his father, young Nick grows up on North Clark Street, home of the hustler, the "hard-eyed, the con-man, the pimp." Escape comes in the form of "The Man what brings the heat." Most everybody is on the weed. Nick watches his own mother get hooked and degenerate into a slavering junkie who pads down with anybody who will give her the money for her morning fix. Inevitably, Nick starts to torch up himself. His salvation is Magazine Writer Holloway, who is doing a series of taped interviews on the dope trade.

In a hophead dream of an ending, Nick goes away for a cure, comes back, presumably to marry Holloway's daughter and settle down to a career as an artist. As the book jacket puts it solemnly: "Nobility and love may flower wherever the seeds are sown." What the book has to offer is the authenticity of setting and speech that recalls Nelson Algren's excursion into the same territory. Unfortunately, Author Motley has not written another Man With the Golden Arm--but only a sort of Man With the Wire-Recorder Ear.

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