Night Fire

This is a novel about Mississippi---Edward Kimbrough's Mississippi.

NIGHT FIRE is the story of an incident of not importance at all which flares with astounding speed into a state-wide sensation, and comes quickly to a flaming denouement.

Mr. Kimbrough's story is built around Ashby Pelham, Temp, the Negro, and a girl names Laurel. Temp had done nothing at all important, but that little was enough to make capital for a Negro-hating sheriff names Turkey Littlepage. Ashby determined to save his friend Temp because he liked him, and because that was what a Pelham would do as a matter of instinct. And Laurel, who entered Ashby's life in a strange fashion, soon became the reason and the justification for Ashby's action.

The author has surrounded these three with as rich a set of characters as could be imagined. There is Ashby's uncle, for whom politics has supplanted humanity. There is Bevo Banes, who believes that white labor and black labor can co-operate and proves it, and his natural enemy, the industrialist whose plan is to hold down both sides by setting them at each others' throats. And there are the women behind these men, a diverse and wholly rewarding group.

Mr. Kimbrough sees the South and its problems very clearly, but always in terms of people and their actions. NIGHT FIRE is no disguised tract, but a full-blooded and tense novel that rises swiftly to a thundering climax. The book is important, dramatic and richly human.