The Gaunt Woman

MR. GILLIGAN’S thriller has all the classical ingredients. His Nazis engaged in mothering subs off the Grand Banks have a suitable low cunning, unscrupulousness, and the will to cut little children’s throats. His Gloucesterman is suitably Irish-Yankee, and his true love is appropriately a war nurse with a wounded naval father and a heart that would do credit to a pit-bull. With the naval father, a loyal Danish seaman, and some Newfoundlanders, they get involved with a pack of submarines, the mother ship The Gaunt Woman, and quantities of individual Nazis.

It is all patriotic and exciting and a little appalling. Mr. Gilligan’s hero in his noble rage likes to adopt all the treachery of his enemies; he finds it satisfying to kick the dead bodies of his victims, and the scene in which he tenderly asks Margaret to look away while he blows out the brains of a Nazi captain, already half destroyed by knife, is one for the anthologies.

Some people may be a little dismayed by this particular variety of pulp. Perhaps it is legitimate to divide the characters sternly into sheep and goats, and to let guilty blood flow like water and weep over every drop of innocent blood. But it is bothersome to think that perhaps this was written seriously, and it is more bothersome to find the hero more bloodthirsty than the fantastic Nazis he lights, and to have his jungle ferocity held up as a model of good Americanism.

W. S.