The scale of corruption in Manchester’s book is more modest, for there the rotten façade has been undermined by a local numbers racket rather than a national group. The bought politicians are clearly drawn, as are the agents who subvert them. Once again we are dealing with fiction, but we need only turn to the findings of state and federal commissions of inquiry to see the bases in fact. The best of these rather ordinary novels is _The City of Anger_. The Freudian critic will be interested in Manchester’s recurrent images of decay, corruption, and physical filth which may, however, represent an attempt to buttress stylistically his basic theme of political and moral corruption. In _Caesar’s Angel_ Mrs. Amsbary’s criminals and police are terribly hard-boiled but not completely convincing. Although her gangsters are much better done than Mrs. Langley’s in _A Lion Is in the Streets_, she still sounds somehow like a very nice lady trying to be very tough. With his clipped, repetitive sentences and grim-jawed men, Coe seems to be suffering from an overdose of Hemingway. Yet at times he manages to go one hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction with dialogue like this from “Young Tim”: “You alone, Mums, combine such true goodness of soul with such great understanding of things!” Concern over threats to personal freedom forms the basis for Shaw’s _The Troubled Air_ and Shirer’s _Stranger Come Home_. The events and characters in these novels make it clear that they too have as their starting points the contemporary history which they cloak in fiction. The blacklists of Shaw’s book are as real as Shirer’s Senator O’Brien and his Senate Committee on Security and Americanism. Shirer’s people are taken from contemporary American life. Across his stage parade General Cyrus Field Clark, a newspaper chain owner of medieval prejudices and keeper of faded ex-movie star Madeleine Marlowe; Bert Woodruff, a demented columnist; William McKinley Forbes, dictatorial tobacco tycoon; and Senator Reynolds, the committee’s representative from the Old South. The supporting roles are filled with the same accuracy. They include the professional ex-Communists and the sharp little committee counsel who puts loaded questions with ominous mentions of perjury. The commentator’s radio career is destroyed like that of his Foreign Service friend, although both are innocent men. Shirer ranges far afield, from comments upon similar periods of “hysteria” in American history to Hollywood’s refusal to film _Hiawatha_ because his “peace efforts might be regarded as Red propaganda.” The plight of Whitehead is well imagined, but the book’s diary form is not a particularly happy choice and much of its prose is awkward. As a record of the source of some of the most spectacular domestic news of recent years, however, the novel is worth reading.