Word: ellin
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...PANAMA PORTRAIT (242 pp.)- Stanley Ellin-Random House...
...books, Paul Mandel's Main-side, a skilled first novel set at a Florida naval air station, and Stanley Ellin's The Panama Portrait, which takes place on an island off South America, illustrate just how far-flung fictional organization men are becoming...
...themselves down. If they wait too long they strangle to death. It is, after all, a bit like bullfighting; and besides, to get the rock lobster contract he must seem simpdtico to the proud Bam-bas-Quincy family, whose wealth dominates the island. Finally, Ben Smith sees what Author Ellin's cluttered symbolism has been thundering about all along: U.S. commerce and Santo Stefano cruelty are all of a piece. The self-control demanded of the self-hanged men-who lose the contest if they begin to twitch and jiggle in the noose too soon-is precisely the quiescence...
...Author-Ellin, an accomplished mystery writer now trying to go straight, had the makings of a good suspense yarn. But by locking himself into such pretentious symbolism, he begs to be taken seriously. And taken seriously he is a laugh. Ben Smith is not salvageable on any terms. The new freedom he is supposed to find in art dealing is merely a change of directors. When Dealer Klebenau runs out of money, he will no doubt con poor Smith into stealing the Mona Lisa-for art's sake, of course...
...Author Ellin Mackay Berlin (Lace Curtain, Land I Have Chosen) wrote this book as a kind of sentimental duty to the past. By the time the upstart Mackays had become aristocratic, she herself outraged her Roman Catholic family in 1926 by marrying Songwriter Irving Berlin, son of Russian Jewish immigrants. She notes with wonder that her grandmother was born in an East Side slum only a few blocks away from where, 50 years later, Irving Berlin spent his childhood. With just such a sense of place she moves competently from the mining disasters in the Comstock to the horrors...