FREDERIC WAKEMAN appeared on the fiction scene with Shore Leave, a close-up of a group of Navy officers on a binge in a San Francisco hotel suite. It was a lively, candid shot of the young men of the moment, one of the first and one of the best. His next book, The Hucksters, was also candid camera work on an extremely photogenic subject, a big-time advertising agency. His portrait of Evan Llewelyn Evans (identified by many as the late G. W. Hill) is large as life and twice as natural, and his satiric lampooning of the “thirty grand a year and ulcer” boys is excellent and deserved. But it is still camera work, the product of a sharp ear and eye and a natural talent for reproduction. But it is in this present novel. The Saxon Charm (Rinehart, $2.75), that Mr. Wakeman proves he is in the lists to stay and to be reckoned with. For in this book he has created character, the essential function of the novelist.

Matt Saxon is a theatrical producer, a fable in a notoriously fabulous profession. He is a legend in constant process of creation — by Matt Saxon, He has a compulsion to fantastic extravagance whose roots lie in his poverty-stricken childhood, and a compulsion to charm whose roots lie in his race shame, for Matt Saxon grew up as Abe Koppel, the son of poor East Side Jews. In his wish to forget, lies a double burden of guilt: the shame of being ashamed, and a constant drive to new conquest, newer extravaganzas. The reader knows Saxon objectively-through straight narrative and through his effect on other people, mainly Eric Busch, a successful young novelist whose first play, based on the life of Molière, is under option to Saxon. The action of the novel is contained within their relationship, from Busch’s first call on the producer, through his rewriting under Saxon’s direction, to the break-up of their intense professional and personal bond.

Through Busch’s eyes we meet the three important women in Saxon’s life: Alma Wragge, self-styled as “the only virgin in show business,” saddled with a drunkard mother and the problem of why Saxon with his superlative luxury can’t seem to offer material help; Vivian, Saxon’s ex-wife, feminine, helpless in her love for him; Rhea Birkani, portrait painter, unwed mother of Saxon’s child, founder of the “anti-Saxon club,” who still can talk of nothing but Saxon. In the glitter and tension of the theatrical world, a backdrop in brilliant technicolor, the Saxon story unfolds. A legend is born, renews itself, destroys itself, in a constantly decreasing spiral.

The book has faults. But the virtues outweigh the defects. Not so slick as The Hucksters, it is a better book. He has created, not reproduced, the world behind the world behind the footlights, and peopled it with original and arresting characters. People are going to read and talk about The Saxon Charm and remember it later as something that really happened. Wakeman, as well as Saxon, has created a legend.

Vincent McHugh says of his novel The Victory (Random House, $3.50), “I wanted to write a book that could be lived in for a while, like another life.” He has accomplished his wish. The Victory is a story of many assorted people, of the communal life of a ship, of a long crossing of a great ocean, of a faraway island and the Chamorros who lived there, who knew hurt and death under their Japanese invaders, who found a leader in a young stranger, who were still sick and hungry in the red tape and officialdom of the Americans.

The Hopi Victory is a good ship, with a good captain and a satisfied crew. McHallam is what the men on the Hopi Victory — or any other ship—call a good guy. And he is what this reader calls a good narrator, thoughtful, speculative, with a sense of time and space and a belief in human dignity and value. He is old enough to accept things as they are — and young enough to want to improve them.

The Victory has that rare and wonderful thing, the sense of the passage of time. It has the pace and texture of life, instead of the stepped-up immediacy of much contemporary fiction. It takes the reader as long to cross the Pacific as it took the Hopi Victory; one is completely identified with the sea beneath, the sky above, the great concern of war dwarfed by the personalities and trivia of life aboard. With McHallam we first hear the legend of Jase on one of the nearer islands, of his choice to befriend a brave and gentle people, of the American landing on Matam, with Jase like a twentieth-century Moses leading the first Chamorros in from the hills.

And the magic of speculation grows in us as it did in McHallam in the intervening days, until the Hopi Victory rolls into Matam in the enormous sea “like a lady going to church with her gloves on.” Here, at the legend’s source, we find it even greater, Jase himself still greater than the legend, “like somebody in Homer” as the Pilot said. Jase, the wild-riding boy of the Utah prairie, has brought to this Far Eastern island the frontier spirit and ability of his Western forebears, finding that the qualities which had earned him respect and devotion in his own desert would also serve in this remote desert of the sea. “We were the new Elizabethans,” thinks McHallam. “We had gone out over the world as if it were nothing but the clear mirror of our confidence.”It. is a fair comparison, and this is the first book known to this reviewer which places our men-of-war out of their immediate generation, which recognizes trivia as such, and knows that it does not deny to gallantry and adventure their place in the ages.

The publishers describe Sterling North’s So Dear to My Heart (Doubleday, $2.75), as “a lampliglited novel of Indiana in 1903,”but although lamplight has an overtone of mellow nostalgia and is a pretty word in itself, it does not do justice to the book. This is not a book of papa’s after-dinner nap, of horsehair sofas, and Sunday-school picnics. This is a book full of the magic the world holds for young creatures who know important things that exist in the best folk poetry.

This is a story about a boy and his pet lamb. Jeremiah Kincaid was ten years old. He was an orphan, and he lived with his Granny Kincaid in a weather-beaten cabin in southern Indiana. Samantha Kincaid sang ballads to herself as she put up preserves and carded and dyed the wool from which she wove coverlets. Not since her great-grandmother had come through the Cumberland (Jap and up the wilderness trails had any member of her immediate family left Cal Hollow for such a spectacle as the Pike County Fair.

And it is the Pike County Fair that Jerry has set his . heart on, for it is there that he must show Danny — Danny the black lamb nobody wanted but Jerry, who has brought him up so loved and polished that he is a very special kind of lamb. Uncle Hiram, the kind blacksmith who can make anything into a ballad as well as make fishpoles for small boys, is back of the project and so is Tildy, Jerry’s playmate. How they get there in all the grandeur of the green plush of “Old 99“ and what happens at the judges’ stand is the story. It is a very good story, but over and above it and through it are the ease and goodness of a simple and more rooted world where the impact of natural wonder was not blunted. Mr. North has cut out the undergrowth of a half century of speed and noise so that even the most sophisticated reader should find his way clear to hearing the music of this book. It should delight the enormous audience of The Yearling.

William E. Wilson’s Crescent City (Simon and Schuster, $3.00) is a novel that has been written before, many times. It is a perfectly good and appropriate novel to write. It says things familiar to most Americans over thirty, and it says other things essential for all Americans of any age. It does not offer novelty, nor does it strive for effect. It is the story of a Middle Western town, of the people who live there, of their immediate background. Stephen Holt loved his father, Jay, the kind and gent le newspaper editor who did not crusade, but who believed life was more important than death. But Stephen Holt made the American pilgrimage common to his generation, he left Crescent City for New York, and New York for farther places. He was a war correspondent, a Washington correspondent. But his roots were in Crescent City. It is there he is going on the train with the telegram of his father’s death in his pocket, as the story opens.

His memory and emotion provide the unity for the body of the book, a body made up of many short sketches of the people and events which make up the life of Crescent City, of Jay Holt, and of Stephen Holt himself. As the book ends, with Stephen finally able to give active release to the grief which the material demands of death have denied, his estranged wife, Esther, rings the bell, and as he realizes that his real life lies here in Crescent City, he also realizes that Esther belongs in this life, and not the fascinating Frenchwoman with whom he has been having an affair.

The reader leaves him then, sympathizing with this realization and knowing more about the tolerance and intolerance of the whole from this small part, knowing the importance of the true value, the good decision, in the smallest and simplest community.