"No Country."
A courtroom story, depicting the injustice of a German bookseller framed for his political views, based closely on the trial of Bates's friend Charles Lahr. Lahr, a London bookseller and supporter of writers, assisted Bates in the early years of his career financially, personally (often providing Bates with a place to stay), and as publisher of some of Bates's works. Baldwin (111-112) discusses in detail Lahr's arrest in January 1935, the confession manipulated from him by the police, the efforts by Bates and others to help him, and the sentence of four months imprisonment; he also chronicles Lahr's displeasure at the story, despite his advocacy of "politically engaged and socially relevant" literature, possibly because it "publicized an event which he preferred to keep secret." In Globe (May, 1937), Something Short and Sweet (1937), The Star (June 29, 1938), Thirty-One Selected Tales (1947).