BASIL HEATTER – The Dim View. Farrar Straus & Co., hardcover, 1946. Signet #668, paperback, 1948. Popular Library #602, paperback, 1954.

   Jim Masters (like Basil Heatter), is skipper of a PT boat in New Guinea in WWII. He gets blown up, ass over tit, and wakes up recuperating in Australia.

   A young, pretty barmaid falls in love with him, and he with her, as much as he can after what he’s been thru. He’s been thru enough and served long enough, he can get discharged if he wants.

   He talks it over with an Navy psychiatrist, German Jewish defector, Dr. Schwartz. “’It is a bad thing to run away,’ Schwartz said. ‘It may not seem important at the time but later there is always a little soft spot, a spot of fear. It is like cutting open a fine, healthy-looking fruit and finding inside a little spot of rottenness. Unless the rotten spot can be cut out quickly, it grows bigger and finally the whole thing must be thrown away.’”

   Masters replies “That spot is in me. I guess it was always in me way down. But today it started to spread. It’s rotten, al right, I can taste the rottenness in my mouth.”

   How do you cut out the rotten spot of fear once it begins to metastasize? Dr. Schwartz says the most effective way “is simply to go back to whatever produced the fear and to face it and try to master it. I say this is more dangerous because it is a gamble. If you win, the fear will be gone but if you fail then the fear will master you completely and you will be broken and done for.”

   So to the dismay of Masters’s cohorts and his lady friend, he decides to return to the New Guinea front rather than be discharged safely to California, to once again captain a PT boat against constant bombardment from above and torpedoing from below.

   At 155 pages told in wonderfully clipped language, the story clips along at quite a clip. This is a first novel, and it feels like Heatter put a lot of himself in it. Achingly authentic, the contrast between the languid pace of the Australian recuperation and the Autobahn-esque speed of war quickens one’s pulse as the story unfolds.

   It’s a good one.