Word: faulknerisms
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KNIGHT'S GAMBIT (246 pp.)-William Faulkner-Random House...
...years Mississippi Novelist William Faulkner has published 18 books. Some of them (The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, Intruder in the Dust) are among the best in 20th Century U.S. fiction; others, as might be expected from a man producing at Faulkner's rate, are inferior and slapdash. In the latter group is Knight's Gambit, a collection of six stories (a couple of them written for the Satevepost) more or less conforming to detective-story formulas...
...Faulkner's detective-hero, Gavin Stevens, is a small-town Mississippi lawyer with gritty common sense and a shrewd insight into poor-white psychology that enables him to unravel his county's crimes. Up to a point he is both likeable and credible-a Yoknapatawpha County Sherlock Holmes-but Faulkner runs him to the ground by overloading him with unnecessary and undemonstrated learning ("a Harvard graduate . . . who could discuss Einstein with college professors") and with too much folksy moralizing...
Once in a while, the old Faulkner power comes through in a blaze of language, an original phrase (a gangster has "a face like a shaved wax doll"), or an insight into rural character. But except for Tomorrow, an effective account of how the family loyalties of a poor-white clan can tangle the job of justice, the stories fall between two stools: they are neither ingenious enough to be good detective yarns nor deep and free enough to be good Faulkner Detective-story fans will be horrified to find crucial clues spelled out in italics; Faulkner fans will find...
Homework. In Sidney, Neb., Merle E. Faulkner explained to police how he happened to be carrying an uprooted parking meter on his shoulder: he had been having a little trouble pilfering its hoard and had decided to work on it at his leisure elsewhere...