A Prisoner's Progress

BURN, KILLER, BURN! (391 pp.) -- Paul Crump -- Johnson ($4.95).

Convict Paul Crump has been much publicized. The crime he was convicted for-- a 1953 holdup slaying--was apparently the act of an angry young Negro who went wrong in an environment where nobody ever found it easy to go right. Last summer, when he was only hours away from the electric chair, Illinois Governor Otto Kerner finally yielded to mounting national pressure and commuted Crump's sentence to life imprisonment (TIME, Aug. 10). Why? Because Crump, in the course of his imprisonment, had become an entirely different personality. And one of the many things that helped to transform him was working on a novel.

Now out, the book is in some respects a pleasant surprise.

Looking back on his own pre-prison life not so much in anger as in new-found wisdom, Crump tells the story of Guy Morgan. Like Crump, Morgan hates his father, a hellfire-and-brimstone revival preacher with a weakness for girls, who finally abandons the family for the favors of a particular girl named Zola. Morgan, like Crump, is brutally and unjustifiably beaten by a Negro-hating Chicago cop. But with plenty of precedent and plenty of excuse for blaming all Morgan's troubles on society, Crump instead makes his story illustrate a more mature individual judgment--a man can live only if he forgets his own resentment and takes responsibility for his own actions. As presented by Crump, Morgan is not so much a victimized black as a man so full of hate that he can't see straight. Morgan confuses his father with the angry Jehovah his father so often quotes. When he steals for the first time, he hears the voice of Jehovah calling "Thou shalt not steal." "Shut up, you son-of-a-bitch," Morgan snaps as if in reply. "You shouldn't have gone away with Zola." But most of Crump's dramatic confrontations, like revival-meeting confessions, have an overwritten melodramatic ring.

Crump is aware of his novel's short comings. When you're writing such things, he says, "how can you keep from sounding vulgar?" Despite this, Crump is writing another book, about a Negro prizefighter. Not much in Burn, Killer, Burn! suggests that it will be even a fair book. But any one who has come as far as Paul Crump is a hard man to bet against.

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