Part 12 (1/2)

Unsympathetic college novel of a girl suffering through a lesbian affair while all around her the other girls suffer through rape, incest and abortion. Over-written.

_Girls in 3-B._ Crest pbo 1959. One of three young girls who come to the city to find jobs or careers, Barby drifts into a lesbian relations.h.i.+p, mostly out of revulsion against two unfortunate experiences with men. Excellent, sympathetic.

+ _Stranger on Lesbos._ Crest pbo 1959. A married woman with a grown son and indifferent husband, returning to college for work on a college degree, is ripe for an affair with ”Bake”, a confirmed lesbian. The affair is told with sufficient skill and restraint to make it believable; even Frankie's eventual return to her old life is not a cliche ”happy ending” but well prepared and well characterized. Remarkably good; the degree of progress from the first to the third of these novels makes your editors anxious to see where Miss Taylor goes from here.

TELLIER, ANDRe. _Twilight Men._ Greenberg 1931, pbr Lion 1950, 52, 56, Pyramid 1959, (m). Well known.

+ TEY, JOSEPHINE. (pseud. of Elizabeth MacKintosh.) _Miss Pym Disposes._ Macmillan 1948; also in _Three by Tey_, Macmillan 1954.

Slowly built-up, excellently constructed mystery of a girl's school, where a close attachment between two seniors provides solution and motivation for a murder. The level of mystification is so high that even on the last page the reader is gasping with the final, shocking surprise.

_To Love and be Wise._ Macmillan 1951. Another well done mystery, with a variant attachment also providing motive and solution and a high level of suspense and surprise.

TESCH, GERALD. _Never The Same Again._ G P Putnam's Sons 1956, pbr Pyramid 1958, (m). Not for the squeamish, but a well-done novel of an affair between a teen age boy and an older man.

+ TIMPERLEY, ROSEMARY. _Child in the Dark._ Crowell 1956. Two of the three stories in this book involve intense attachments, variant but not explicitly lesbian, between an English schoolmistress and a young girl.

THAYER, TIFFANY. _Thirteen Women._ Claude Kendall, 1932. Mildly nasty shock-story of a murder, involving thirteen women, one mixed up with a lesbian; she eventually commits suicide.

_Thirteen Men._ Claude Kendall 1930, (m). Much the same stuff as above only masculine in emphasis. Thayer is a good writer, but not everyone's choice.

THOMPSON, JOHN B. _Girls of the French Quarter._ Beacon pbo 1954.

_Frenzy of Desire._ Encore Press 1957. Evening wasters.

THOMPSON, MORTON. _Not as a Stranger._ Chas. Scribner's Sons, 1954 pbr Pocket Books 1955. fco, very minor episodes.

+ THORNE, ANTHONY. _Delay in the Sun._ Literary Guild, 1934. A ”heartening idyll” of two friends who, during a long stopover in Spain, resolve their relations.h.i.+p.

+ TORRES, TERESKA. _Woman's Barracks._ Gold Medal pbo 1950, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59 and probably every year from now on, for a while anyhow. Gold Medal's most popular t.i.tle so far is the story of a group of women with the Free French women's army, at loose ends and disa.s.sociated from family, friends and personal attachments. Among the many threads of the plot is the story of naive young Ursula, who, through her relations.h.i.+p with warm, tough, friendly Claude is helped to maturity and eventually to readjustment to normal life.

_Dangerous Games._ Dial 1957, pbr Crest 1958. A married woman, discovering her husband is having an affair with her closest friend, briefly becomes infatuated with her too.

_Not Yet._ Crown 1957, pbr Crest 1958. The story of four young girls in a French school; not children but ”not yet” women, and their adjustment to life and love. The narrator, the least mature, is as yet infatuated only with Mother Nathalie, her teacher; no overt behavior is implied except kisses, but the nun's reaction when the heroine begins to be interested in boys brings this under the scope of the study.

_The Golden Cage._ Dial 1959. (trans. from French by Meyer Levin).

A group of refugees in wartime, waiting for visas in Portugal, undergo various transient attachments. Among the group are several lesbians, treated with sympathy and sensitivity.

TRAVIS, BEN. _The Strange Ones._ Beacon pbo 1959, (m). Evening waster about a young no-good who earns his living as a paid escort/gigolo and relaxes with boy friends but still loudly insists he is normal. Your editor enjoyed this out of sheer perversity; usually novels treating of male h.o.m.os.e.xuality engage the subject with deadly seriousness, while the paperback originals reek with drooling voyeuristic strip-teases about lesbians, for the sake of men who like to enjoy pipe-dreams about lesbians making love, and about some Big Handsome Hero who eventually converts the girls to ”normality” with some secret formula of caresses. So it is a nice change to see the gay BOYS getting the in-and-out-of-the-sheets treatment for once.

TRYON, MARK. _The Fire that Burns._ Berkley pbo 1959 scv.

_Take it Off._ Vixen Press 1953, Modern Press 1956, scv.

UNTERMEYER, LOUIS. (Editor). _The Treasury of Ribaldry._ Doubleday 1956, pbr Popular Library 1959 (v. 1). This contains Lucian's ”Dialogues of Courtesans”, ent.i.tled in this translation ”The Lesbian” and ”A Curious Deception”. The hardcover edition also contains some of the Songs of Bilitis.

VAIL, AMANDA (pseud. of Warren Miller). _The Bright Young Things._ Little, Brown, 1958. pbr Crest 1960.

In a story of two worldly young college girls experimenting with life and love, a subplot involves two of their friends, lesbians.

Minor but fun.