NEW THRILLERS

Fun with guns

PETER PARLEY

Blind Man with a Pistol Chester limes (Hodder and Stoughton 30s) Message Ends David Craig (Cape 21s) Spies of Good Intent Gabriel Veraldi (Deutsch 35s) The Siege of Trencher's Farm Gordon M. Williams (Seeker and Warburg 30s) The Black Ship Paul and Sheila Mandel (Hutchinson 35s) Spy for Sale Laurence Payne (Hodder and Stoughton 25s) Make it Happen to Me Christopher Wood (Constable 30s)

As the chronicler of Harlem in the manner of Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes has an enormous following in America. But this is only his second hardback to be released in this country. His own life has been as tempestuous as his characters': twenty years for armed robbery in the Ohio State Peni- tentiary, and a period in Cleveland running

a game for the pre-Capone gambler who rejoiced in the name of 'Bunch Boy'. It would be hard to think of anyone better qualified to record, through the eyes of his two hardbitten negro detectives Coffin Ed and Digger, the pulsating life of a Harlem continually on the boil.

Blind Man with a Pistol is an explosive, episodic book weaving some of the more

bizarre outbursts of local life into a rich compost of violence conceived at oven heat. On their rounds Coffin Ed and Digger en- counter the Reverend Sam in his tenement 'convent' with eleven wives, a white queer slumming for kicks gets his throat cut, the soul brothers roll dice in Fo-Fo's Sporting Gentlemen's Club, and a hapless white liberal organising a Brotherhood march runs up against Black Power. Murders, never premeditated, are a natural adjunct of life in Himes's Harlem, along with the dubious love potions, whoring, petty crime, hustling and general mayhem which keep the two detectives on their toes. The blind man who runs amok in the subway at an imagined slight is Himes's allegory of the unorganised violence which does more harm than good to the Black Muslim cause. Polemic apart, this book is the richest slice of Harlem life to cross the Atlantic for some time.

David Craig's Message Ends is a charac- teristically twisty plot set in the Britain of

the 'seventies. America has withdrawn into an insular non-involvement and a powerful movement within the country called 'Nego- tiate Now' urges immediate capitulation to the vast Soviet-Bonn bloc. Rickman, the right hand man of the charismatic Jimmy Haynes, head of Parliamentary Investiga- tions, is swept into a seemingly bottomless conspiracy on the part of the Ministry of Information to reduce public morale to the point of capitulation, while ostensibly boost- ing morale in the traditional way. Mr

Craig's 'Reversal Response'—the method by which the villains assess with computer accuracy the response of certain sectors of the public to well-tried propaganda words—

is a brilliant idea, and quite alarming if one reads political speeches today in the light of his theory.

In Spies of Good Intent an inter- national secret organisation of scientists, always good for a laugh but quite well presented here, on Pugwash lines, ruthlessly suppresses such scientific discoveries as it thinks dangerous to mankind. The hero Francis Verne, a brilliant Anglo-French scientist and, of course, a karate expert, plays a dangerous double game as the agent of the scientists and as a French spy. The action is fast and the characters convin- cingly alive.

Gordon Williams is evidently preoccupied by the sinister rustlings in the hedgerows of the Celtic fringe. His twin villages of Dando and Compton Wakeley (suspiciously close to the Somerset village of Compton Dando) house a morose inbred population resentful of intruders and guarding their own closely kept secret of a harvest festival murder, perpetrated years ago by a group of scythe wielding villagers on a wandering soldier accused of child molesting. Into this hot- bed of rural decay comes George Magruder, an over-sanitised, ineffectual American pro- fessor. The snow falls and the village is cut off leaving Magruder as unwilling host to an injured escaped lunatic with a record of rape. A little girl disappears from the vicarage tea party and the more un- balanced elements in the village form a lynch mob. Magruder, who lives in a dreamworld of pioneer log cabins and Indian fighting, keeping the real world at bay with deodorant sprays, defends his rented cottage and his self-respect with a baseball bat. The setting is perhaps too reminiscent of those films which feature an innocent family held prisoner in their own homes by dangerous convicts, spiced with a hint of age-old rural vice, but the plight of an over-civilised, uncertain, man rising to the occasion with savage ferocity is an irresistible theme.

The Black Ship, a straight wartime thriller begun by Paul Mandel and finished without a perceptible break by his wife after his death, is a very professional story of an

American navy lieutenant seconded to an English torpedo boat squadron defending convoys in the North Sea. The Anglo- American squadron is decimated by an ss destroyer and the few survivors, rescued by the Dutch underground, plan to blow up the ship in its dock. Disagreements between the American and his English commanding officer about the unmilitary nature of the operation and the plight of the townsfolk, under the twin demands of the Germans and the resistance, are well handled and the pace is maintained throughout.

Lastly two entertaining comedy thrillers, a neglected genre which is often better value than the usual overworked plots of straight

thrillers. Laurence Payne's hero in Spy for Sale is an ineffectual burglar, given the

unlikely and well-paid job of handing out tracts in Oxford Street, who finds himself rapidly enmeshed in a world of bodies in the bath and international spy rings.

Shuttled about like an erratic tennis ball he makes endless compromises and somehow

wins through. Christopher Wood's Make It Happen to Me is a good lightweight laugh about a group of hopelessly miscast, and

chronically lecherous, temporary members of the Colonial Office sent to West Africa to instruct the natives in the finer points of

a forthcoming UN plebiscite; my colleague Henry Tube who, like Mr Wood, took part in a remarkably similar plebiscite in the

Southern Cameroons in 1961, suspects that much of his material may well be based on real experience. The ensuing mess provides ample opportunities for comic relief and Mr Wood misses none of them, though the sub-plot of gun running is a weak element which could have been jettisoned.