glorified friendship between two cousins ends in murder.

CALDWELL, ERSKINE. Tragic Ground. Little, Brown & Co, 1944, pbr Signet 1948, fco.

CAPOTE, TRUMAN. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Random House 1958, pbr Signet 1959. In the story of a promiscuous, rather pathetic girl, a sadistic lesbian neighbor brings on violent events. Everything very subtle and indirect.

Other Voices, Other Rooms. Random House 1948, pbr Signet 1959. Young boy slowly falling under the influence of a decadent uncle who is a transvestite. Macabre.

CARCO, FRANCIS. Depravity. pbo Berkley 1957.

Infamy. pbo Berkley 1958.

Both, of these books hint at lesbianism on the cover blurbs, but are, rather, highly risque French novels with brief, irrelevant and heterosexually oriented contact between women characters strictly for voyeuristic effect.

CARPENTER, EDWARD. Iolaus; an Anthology of Friendship. N. Y., Albert & Charles Boni, 1935, (m). Listed as “the first of its kind” this is said also to be “very vague and old-fashioned.”

+ CASAL, MARY. The Stone Wall. An Autobiography. Chicago, Eyncourt, Press, 1930. In casual, conversational and entirely frank form, a woman born in 1865 (and therefore, at the time of writing, in her sixties) tells the story of her entire life as a lesbian. With the exception of “slightly autobiographical”—and always greatly disguised—fiction, this is probably the earliest such memoir in the literature. The writing is highly competent and professional, (subtly denying the author’s insistence that she was not a writer;) and filled with most interesting revelations about the lesbian world of New York and Paris at the turn of this century. Unfortunately the book is rare and expensive, but it stands alone as a classic of its kind.

CHAMALES, TOM T. Go Naked in the World. N. Y. Scribners 1959. Nick Stratton, wounded veteran, returns to find that his girl friend is a call-girl and a lesbian.

CHANDLER, RAYMOND. The Big Sleep. Knopf 1939, pbr Pocket Books 1950, and others. (m) The bizarre murder of a homosexual hoodlum, and the interrogation of his boy friend, form important sequences in this hard-boiled murder mystery.

CHEEVER, JOHN. “Clancy in the Tower of Babel”, ss in The Enormous Radio, Funk 1953, pbr Berkley 1958, (m).

+ CHRISTIAN, PAULA. The Edge of Twilight. pbo Crest 1959. Airline stewardess Val, in an alcoholic haze, allows herself to make love to a young girl friend, Toni. Fearing her own response to this “abnormal” love, she redoubles her promiscuous sleeping-around, but the girls end up together. The treatment, though sensational, is honest and constructive; the book will win no literary prizes, but whatever the reader’s sympathies and prejudices, he will approve the stand that happy adjustment to love and affection—even homosexual—is a more constructive solution than promiscuity. Very good of its kind.

CHRISTIE, AGATHA. A Murder is Announced. Dodd, Mead 1950, fco. Suspects include a pair of problematical lesbians.

CLARK, DORENE. The Exotic Affair. Magnet Books, 1959, scv. “I really think this one should be Maggot Books,” wrote my reviewer. “One of those fastmoving sloppy jobs where two men and two women on an exotic cruise complete with mis-spelled and misapplied foreign phrases spend most of their time trying all of the printable and some of the unprintable variations on an old old theme. All sex and no sentiment makes Jack and Jill sickening (and the reviewer sick) or, for that matter, Jack and Jack or Jill and Jill.”

+ CLAYTON, JOHN. Dew in April. Kendall & Sharpe, 1935. Romance of the Middle Ages, laid in the Convent of St. Lazarus of the Butterflies. Dolores, a homeless vagabond, is given shelter by Mother Leonor, a mystic, repressed, white-hot and deeply tender woman whose passionate emotional attachments to her young novices are never explicit but pervade the entire book. Much of the story is concerned with a subtle, sweet and innocently sensual blossoming of adolescent emotions into homo-erotic form under the pressures of convent life; the interplay of delicate love relationships between Dolores, Mother Leonor, and the young novices Dezirada and Clarisse, and their fluctuation between despair, self-sacrifice and compassionate love when Dolores finds a knightly lover, Pedro, is probably unmatched in studies of feminine variance.

Gold of Toulouse. Kendall & Sharpe, 1935. Sequel to Dew in April, but laid chronologically six or seven years earlier. Though mostly concerned with the adventures of Don Marcos, the Spanish knight, it also tells the story of Leonor, and shows the beginning of her relationship with Dezirada.

CLIFTON, BUD. Muscle Boy. pbo Ace Books, 1958, (m). Teen-age athlete inveigled into posing for dirty pictures. Good evening waster.

COLE, JERRY. Secrets of a Society Doctor. Greenberg, 1935. pbr Universal Publishing & Distributing, ca. 1953, (m).

+ COLEMAN, LONNIE. Ship’s Company. Little, Brown & Co, 1955, pbr Dell, 1957. Collection of short stories, of which two are homosexual.

Sam. David McKay, 1959, pbr Pyramid, 1960, (m). Major, excellent, important. Don’t waste time reading reviews, just go out and buy it.

COLETTE, SIDONIE-GABRIELLE.

Claudine at School.

Claudine in Paris.

The Indulgent Husband (in The Short Novels of Colette). “Bella Vista” in The Tender Shoot. “Gitanette” in Music Hall Sidelights.

All of these are currently in print in excellent, uniform English translation of the standard “Fleuron” edition of Colette’s complete works, from Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, of recent date. The two “Claudine” novels have had recent Avon pbr editions under the titles of Diary of a 15 Year Old French Girl, and Claudine.

Much of the work of this important French novelist was variant. Only the most explicit are named above. The first three form a connected narrative, telling of Claudine’s school crushes, her friendship with a male-homosexual cousin, and her “indulgent husband” who connives at her lesbian affair with a woman friend, in order to enjoy it secondhand. “Bella Vista” tells of a vacation spent, at a hotel managed by two middle-aged lesbians; the narrator’s fascinated interest in the couple vanishes when one of the “ladies” turns out to be, actually, a disguised man.

CONNOLLY, CYRIL. The Rock Pool. Scribner 1936, her New Directions n. d. Very well written novel of a group of expatriates in the South of France. Nearly all are homosexuals; the story is told without comment or judgment.

CONSTANTINE, MURRAY, and Margaret Goldsmith. Venus in Scorpio. John Lane, 1940. Heavily fictionalized biography, (erroneously listed elsewhere as a novel) of Marie Antoinette, suggesting lesbianism in her adolescence.

+ CORY, DONALD WEBSTER. 21 Variations on a Theme. N. Y., Greenberg 1953. The classic anthology of short stories about homosexuals; four deal with feminine variance.

COUPEROUS, LOUIS. The Comedians, N. Y. Doran 1926. Variant couple in a novel of Imperial Rome.

COURAGE, JAMES. A Way of Love. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1959, (m).

COWLIN, DOROTHY. Winter Solstice. Macmillan,