The author spars like Hemingway through much of this first novel ["The Broken Place"] about a soldier-prizefighter who kills a man in the ring. It's probably inevitable. Writers are mostly violent people who act gentle. When a writer is a gentle person who acts violent, as Michael Shaara seems to be, Hemingway is one of the few guides available….

McClain [Mr. Shaara's protagonist] is strong and silent, lives in a cabin on a mountainside, hunts in the early morning. It's still good coinage, whatever the original mint.

Yet the best of "The Broken Place" suffers from no such deprivation. When Mr. Shaara writes at ringside he writes as well as anyone around. He makes McClain an outstanding fighter, intelligent and deadly; he shows us how that kind of fighter fights, then shows us why….

McClain's is a rare sickness, and more rarely still does someone write it truly...