Thrillers
Harriet Waugh
Detective fiction, although a curious and agreeable backwater within the noisy and violent ambit of the crime novel, does suffer a mild inferiority complex about its lack of realism. Sneakingly the writer of it knows that the only realistic way of por- traying the detection of crime is through a boring old policeman. The consequence of this feeling is that a growing clutch of writers are fielding increasingly exotic specimens of the breed. The latest of these is Tony Hillerman's Red Indian tribal police sergeant, Jim Chee in People of Darkness.
Jim Chee is called in by the wife of a multi-millionaire when a box of valueless mementoes is stolen from her husband's safe. She suspects that a Navajo Indian stole the box and badly wants it back. Too badly, in Jim Chee's opinion, and he likes her story still less when the trial leads to a series of dead and dying cancerous Indians. Besides cancer, the Indians have two other things in common:. 30 years previously they had been the only survivors from a crew of oil riggers when an explosion killed every worker on the site, and they all belong to a peyote-eating religious sect. Later, the derelict oil site was bought by B.J. Vines who found uranium and so became the richest man in the world. It is Mr Vines's box of mementoes that has gone missing.
Why are the Indians dead or dying? What really happened on that oil rig? Why is there a hit man stealing the bodies of the dead Indians and killing the descendants of the Peyote chief who warned his followers not to turn up for work on that day? And why is the local sheriff threateningly an- tagonistic to Chee's interest in the case? In no time Chee and a white American girl he picks up find themselves the victims of frightening attempts on their lives. The clues are shrouded in folk Indian obscuran- tism and need all Chee's cultural knowledge to solve them. The novel is fast, fun and even a little exciting. I hope we see more of Jim Chee.
Three years ago, in December 1979, the world's gold market went wild and shot up 400 per cent. Hundreds of thousands of people lost money when a month later the market plummeted to its normal price. Some people, through luck, and a few through jiggery-pokery, made fortunes. Nobody has come up with a credible ex- planation for the occurence. John Goldsmith's novel Bullion claims to be the fictionalised true story behind the event. Straight fiction or fictionalised fact, the novel is a convoluted, exciting and plausible thriller.
A troubled Greek multi-millionaire in possession of 2,000 tons of gold bullion decides to sell it. He realises that if he were to unload the gold straight on to the market, the gold market would dive and he would lose a fortune. Instead, the Mafia take control of arranging the gold's disper- sal. They hire a Russo/American Pole call- ed Eddie Polonski — a metallurgist who came sufficiently close to the alchemist's dream for his business to be blown up by the South African Secret Police. Without Eddie knowing it, the Mafia also hire an in- ternational lawyer called Dan Daniels. Both men are given the job of disposing of the gold secretly to private buyers on a commis- sion that will make them multi-millionaires. Inevitably in their search for rich buyers they cross each other's paths and, realising they are being set-up, decide to join forces. Ranged against them are the South African Secret Police, the Mafia, the CIA, and an international bank that sees a way of fraudulently making a fortune from the sale. It is this banking coup, the wickedness and cleverness of it, that is at the heart of the book. Banking aside, the gunmen, kill- ings and attempted assassinations con- tribute pleasantly beguiling high-jinks.
Control by William Goldman is by far the most sophisticated and best written of this batch of novels. Readers are introduced to an assortment of characters: an in- telligent, rich American housewife who suddenly, for no reason, goes berserk in Bloomingdale's; a psychopathically danger- ous intuitive killer on the run in New York; two cops whose paths criss-cross that of the killer; a disenchanted wife and her virginal poet lover who has a manic fit while making love to her; a blind fortune teller with telepathic powers; and an unpleasant scien- tist who uses the other characters as unwit- ting guinea-pigs in a very nasty experiment. Lurking in the wings, like a big bad wolf, is America. The writer does a dazzling conjur- ing trick with his characters and confound- ed this particular reader. Excellent.
Die a Little by Thomas Kennedy is a spy story with a difference. The middle-aged spy hero lumbers himself with a fat, sloven- ly, drug-addicted, ex-borstal girl as his side- kick and our heroine. The difficulties of pushing her up mountains, escaping a lethal private hospital, sharing a bedroom and be- ing shot at give humorous piquancy to his situation. There is another heroine who is pretty and on the wrong side, but she drags the story down into sentimental fantasy and should have been despatched sooner. The central plot is about the unmasking of a wartime traitor to the French Resistance, now heading an international Nazi con- spiracy. There are plenty of surprises here but the novel gradually loses credibility.
Peter Whalley's first novel Post Mortem is a macabre little thriller. The hero, Alaric, is a very unpleasant young man suffering from acute ennui brought about by a pathological contempt for his fellow man. Since he despises his wife, workmates and friends he naturally finds them boring. To break out of his condition he decides to murder his wife. This idea comes to him after he has indulged in some mild larceny for kicks with a group of flash middle-class friends. However his messy success with his wife (convincingly described) is only half the story. There are some nasty happenings in store for him (which are quite amusing for us) not least that by the end of the book he discovers that he rather misses his wife and has tenuously rejoined humanity. Not that it does him much good. Mr Whalley has a pleasantly disagreeable turn of mind and Post Mortem might well turn out to be the beginning of an interesting career.
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