Royal Street swallowed him and hurried him along with the crowd. Thomas Carlin Presents To-day’s Book! He’d always felt there was a way for his father to put on a broadcast and sell books. The movies did a selling stunt every day. COMING ATTRACTIONS, and then half a dozen shots from next week’s picture. The trick was to dramatize a scene from a book and make people want to read the whole book. Vic probably wouldn’t use him until next Monday’s show. He had almost a whole week. The Thomas Carlin store was busy with men and women from the tall office buildings, shopping during the lunch hour. One of the clerks raised a cupped hand to his lips and Joe shook his head. No; he wasn’t back on the air. His father was out. “I want a book,” he said eagerly to Mr. Fairchild, his father’s assistant. “I don’t care whether it’s an old book or a new book, but it must be a good book with lots of action.” “The jitterbug influence,” Mr. Fairchild smiled. Joe’s hands made an impatient gesture. “Life. Something you can feel. The McCoy.” Vic Wylie might have been speaking. “Something—dramatic?” the man asked with a shrewd glance. Joe went blank. He didn’t want to say anything about this until he saw how it worked out. Mr. Fairchild took a book down from a shelf; the telephone rang, and he had to go to the office. Joe made his escape, winking at the clerks as he passed out toward the street. The next three days were busy days. He was making a show. A book to read and one particular scene to be picked for dramatization. What scene? Chapter Eight offered a scene tense and climactic. But the action called for four characters. Four were too many—a twenty-dollar cast. There was a scene in Chapter Two between the lead and the heavy. Was it strong enough? He walked the floor of his room, reading the passage aloud. Perhaps that run in Chapter Nine with three characters.... Sometimes his brain grew bewildered. He thought of Curt Lake sweating, and swearing, and knocking out a new script under pressure the day his throat had gone bad. There were interruptions—lunch, the _Sue Davis_ broadcast, the family dinner in the evening. But even as he described Sonny Baker or told of Amby Carver’s rout, his mind was upstairs with the book. It would have to be the scene from Chapter Two. He worked behind the closed door of his room and rattled a portable typewriter. He knew the mechanics of writing script, and the dialogue of the scene was before him on the printed pages. The first two sheets of script spun out of the typewriter. Then Joe ran into a passage in the book that analyzed the thought passing through a character’s mind. How did you get a character’s thoughts into a script? Radio had to be dialogue. He wrote, and tore up what he had written, and wrote again. He gave up in despair and fooled with a cross-word puzzle. He pushed that aside and went back to writing. Nothing would jell. He tried talking the scene aloud. Kate Carlin cried: “Joe, are you all right?”