[In the following review of The Last Carousel, Frakes comments on Algren's use of humor in the stories.]

It's about time! When we've got a living American writer as sure-footed and as fast off the mark as Nelson Algren, it's almost criminal not to have something of his in hard covers at least once a year, to heft and roar at and revel in. Having, early in his career, ceded the Chicago territory to Sandburg, Farrell and Algren, Ernest Hemingway later paid our man the ultimate tribute: "Mr. Algren can hit with both hands and move around and he will kill you if you are not awfully careful." Was he, like Seymour Glass, never wrong?

What we have here in this big fat volume [The Last Carousel] is a cockeyed chrestomathy of 37 Algren pieces from 1947 to 1972, reprinted from such journals as The Chicago Sunday Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times, Rolling Stone, The Dude, Commentary, The Atlantic and Playboy. Short fiction, travel sketches, reminiscences, character assassinations, pop history material deleted from A Walk on the Wild Side, odes to Chicago springs. Even occasional lapses into poetry. (Oh hell! Henry James wrote some rotten plays; Lardner ended his career censoring song lyrics; Brando played Napoleon; Billie Holiday liked banked strings behind her singing; and Louis Armstrong recorded with Andy Iona and His Islanders.)

Mr. Algren hates waste, finds nothing dispensable. When he latches on to a snappy line or anecdote, he really milks it, even throws it into his nonfiction to hype the action or distract attention from his greased deal. "I've always thought," he confesses, "I could make it as a standup comic." I guess he figures that the guys he breaks up in the Carefree Corner Bar aren't likely to catch his act the next month at Caesar's Palace. But I suspect he just doesn't give a damn, or else he'd have edited out the repeats and overlappings in this catch-all volume. It's a mistake and a dilution to read this collection from beginning to end, because then you can see the invisible wires, watch the lips move, spot the palmed ace. Skipping pays off here. I don't think you have to be, pace Papa, "awfully careful," just picky enough to be sure you're witnessing Algren at the top of his form, with his hallmark stamped on every link.

My own tip-sheet would read like this: Start with "Dark Came Early in That Country," as authentic a boxing story as I've ever read—the voice, sounds, smells, textures, everything. Then to "Bullring of the Summer Night," where jockey Hollis Floweree gets caught with an electrified whip and dwindles (in "Moon of the Arfy Darfy") into a grandstand "stooper"—stooping for winning tickets people throw away by mistake. A couple of saloon stories next—"A Ticket on Skoronski," where perfect dialogue lifts a cardiac death to raw, wrenching comedy; and "Come in if You Love Money," a consummate juggling act in which the action is split and bounced back and forth between a draw-poker game in the foreground and the 1964 Derby on the tube in the background.

Follow with the definitive account of the 1919 White Sox caper ("Ballet for Opening Day"), the demythologized version of Chicago journalism ("Different Clowns for Different Towns"), and maybe "Previous Days," a handful of memories that Algren somehow never got around to developing—about Blanche Sweet under the tapioca, a Catholic stereopticon ("I saw Christ make Calvary four times"), how to spot feelers and jumpers, a stomach stab-wound sealed with Mystic Tape (it didn't hold), a Willow Springs whorehouse run by an ex-Rams football player who roused the women with a referee's whistle for morning workout ("He made us practice everything but passing").

As you make the turn for home, even off with "The Mad Laundress of Dingdong-Daddy-land," wherein you'll view the archetypal Algren characters in action: "a pair of sexless wrecks—two long-ruined hero-in-heads—were drying contraceptives on a shoerack above a gas stove." And fly under the wire with "Watch Out for Daddy," a gruesomely hilarious saga of a hooker-addict and her pimp. ("Poor useless boy—I'd rather have his hate than some fat square-fig's love. Love or hate, whatever, it don't matter so long as it's real.")

The also-ran material consists of a dozen or so toss-offs, which you can ignore. It's your money. I purely howled at the one about Nijinsky, Diaghilev and a nine-pound mackerel, though I squirmed a little at the plodding narrative of "The Cortez Gang" and the environmental justification of Bonnie and Clyde as outlaw-heroes navel-deep in American tradition. To offset the moony lovesongs to San Francisco and Tokyo, we're treated to lip-smacking hatchet-jobs on Otto Preminger, Alfred Kazin, Writers Workshops, Norman Podhoretz, Jacques Barzun, and academics in general. Though he doesn't seem to care a lot for Kim Novak, Allen Ginsberg or Tony Martin, he does like Carol Channing. The bloodiest St. Valentine's Day Massacre is performed on Simone de Beauvoir ("her sense of personal responsibility for the world had overwhelmed her responses to it") during a Tunisian travelogue.

On his trip to the Orient, Algren managed to record a junior-welterweight title match in Tokyo and a cricket fight in Saigon, as well as to observe how happy women are when they submit gracefully to male dominance. And after nine months in the mysterious East, he emerges with a single aphorism: "Never eat in a place with sliding doors unless you're crazy about raw fish." These nuggets are tossed off like Necco wafers: "Never date a girl vocalist whose favorite song is 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow'—there'll always be a dude in the lobby wearing long sideburns and green eyeshades waiting to take over her check"; "Any time you get into a town where the cops don't have uniforms, you can be sure the chow is going to be lousy."

Okay, but what about all the familiar complaints about Algren's work—his pretending to be a tough-minded naturalist when he's really a closet transcendentalist, his sentimentalizing of the world's losers as if only the fringe-people retained freedom and purity, his shameless exploitation of the dispossessed for easy laughs from the coupon-clippers? Well, all of these charges can be documented from The Last Carousel. Admitted. Lots of chocolate-covered cherries ooze through these pages: "a thousand heartbroken dawns," "dimly fell the shadows, one by one, of bars," "memory ties rainbows of forgetfulness about old lost years," "the fly-a-kite spring," "the broken-handled cups of hopes that had never come true."

The eschatological imagery wears thin: merry-go-rounds going around for the last time, the golden arm failing at last, the ferris-wheel sinking forever downward into dust, toteboard lights going blind with dusk. And you'll recognize the cast of old sad scufflers, dread-the-dawn dingbats, hustlers, nabs, fireships, boothbroads, bings and finks. "You like underdogs?" Preminger wanted to know. To him Algren: "I like some people who are under, but not because they're under. Under is just where they happen to be."

No plea-copping, but the truth is that these drifters are out for everyone's blood; if they're "lovable," it's for reasons Runyon never dreamt of. Algren once pointed out that the great thing about Hemingway's books is their sympathy for those unworthy of it, and that may be the word on Algren himself. Like Howard Hawks, he has deep respect for professionalism, even if the American know-how is applied only to con-jobs, to techniques for moving the minches and flapping the jays. Because he moved fastest and most evasively around the periphery of the White Sox scandal, Abe Attell "survives best of all."

Anyone daring to review Nelson Algren today stands in grave danger of being a "past-poster"—a party who puts down a heavy bet on a horse that has already won.