NEW THRILLERS

Strine crime

CYRIL RAY

A Gathering of Eagles Edward Linda!! (Col- lins 25s) Death by Demonstration Patricia Carlon (Hodder and Stoughton 25s) The Last Man's Head Jessica Anderson (Macmillan 25s) Good Men Do Nothing John Brunner (Hod- der and Stoughton 25s) Dead Man's Bluff Roderic Jeffries (Collins 25s) Mr Campion's Falcon Youngman Carter (Heinemann 30s) Tight Circle J. F. Striker (Harrap 25s) The Hardliners William Haggard (Cassell 28s) My touchier Australian friends must not mis- understand me if I suggest that there is every reason to look for a strong Australian trad- ition of writing about crime. For I refer not to the founding fathers of Botany Bay, but to the fact that Marcus Clarke's grim tale of crime and punishment, For the Term of his Natural Life, appeared very nearly a century ago, and that there was a fictional bushranger of the eighteen-eighties. Captain Starlight (in Rolf Boldrewood's Robbery Under Arms) to match the real-life Ned Kelly of the same generation.

Yet the tradition is not all that strong. True, Miss Margot Neville has written sar- donically about murder among the richer and smarter of her fellow-Australians, but her characters could as easily have come from Long Island or the Thames Valley as from the suburbs of Sydney. Only the late Arthur Upfield, that I can think of, with his half-aborigine detective, lineal and logical descendant of trackers by trade, and with his evocation of the sun-scorched small towns of the back-blocks, created a truly Australian character, functioning against a uniquely Australian background.

Merely to find no fewer than three crime novels by Australians in the current batch, therefore, is in. itself surprising, and it is gratifying that one of them could only have been written of Australia and by one who knows Australia well. In A Gathering of Eagles, three thugs, in their quest for a nickel mine, deliberately leave a Native Wel- fare patrol officer, a woman anthropologist, and an old prospector to die in the desert: the desert itself is a protagonist in the well- told tale, and so is the heat. A nomadic, and especially primitive, aboriginal tribe has its part to play, and there is an interesting clash between the practical welfare officer and the scholarly anthropologist, equally humane, equally concerned, as to how the sophisticated white man should treat them. Chiefly, though, this is a tale of adventure and endurance, and an uncommonly good one.

The other two novels by Australian authors are not so specifically Australian, but each would merit mention, whatever its

authorship or setting. The dialogue in Death by Demonstration is prosy, but the basic idea, even if not convincingly worked out, is

brilliantly original—blackmail by means of flashlight photographs of peace-loving de- monstrators who have just been bewildered by having weapons thrust into their hands. This, mind you, to confuse an investigation into the murder of an undergraduate—a most ingenious and highly readable story.

So is The Last Man's Head, but for quite other reasons. Set in Sydney though it is,

this exploration of the mind of a psychopath (who does not himself appear until half-way through the book) could as easily have been western European, though there is perhaps an especially new-country touch about the corrupt policemen who frame the central figure—a policeman himself, whose person- ality is deployed in depth by a very subtle novelist indeed. Is it possible to mention Simenon and Ivy Compton-Burnett in the same sentence? I find echoes of each—one in the atmosphere, one in the dialogue and the character-drawing—in this quite remark- able study of the springs of one kind of crime.

The other books under review are all home-brewed. though Good Men Do Noth- ing is far from being home-based: its black Jamaican secret agent is shot by a catapult of coincidences from one of the remoter parts of Italy to a Devil's Island of the col- onels' Greece. A much less plausible tale than Mr Brunner's last novel, which I praised here a year ago, but one feels that the white author has got right into a black skin when he describes what his hero thinks of the buckra, while in his account of what the colonels have done to Greece and are doing to their political opponents it is clear that his heart is in the right place.

Much less exotic is Dead Man's. Bluff, deeply embedded in the English countryside, with cattle-cake as a clue in a murder case, along with a luncheon of boiled beef and dumplings: a smoothly readable novel. with the country policeman scoring neatly off the (rather caricatured) smoothie from the Yard. Also set in the English countryside is Mr Campion's Falcon. an urbanely written story of murder among archaeologists—a Cots- wold problem solved in the marshes of East Anglia.. Youngman Carter took up Albert Campion's adventures after the death of his wife. Margery Allingham. He wrote less ex- uberantly. but almost as stylishly, and it is sad that now he. too, is dead.

Town. at least as much as country, is the setting for Tight Circle. largely concerned with a London hank robbery (though there are sorties as far as the New Forest). Mr Straker has a light touch, as well as a cun- ning hand with a plot: the reader is at least as concerned to know whether the attractive young noliceman will ever get his colleague's pretty sister to bed as to have revealed who robbed the hank and did the murders.

Pretty girl's brother is an Etonian. which would. it seems, have sent -the author of The Hardliners into an ecstasy: a character in his book whom he obviously admires and who. like himself. was in the Indian Civil. mistrusts 'the minor nubile school mentality'

and its exemplars. (The author was at Lanc- ing.) 'He thought of such men as a class. not as persons, and privately he called them "it"! The usual William Haggard mixture. in fact: plausible plot, preposterous detail.

quite convincing knowingness about high offices and their holders; a shameless snob-

bishness; clipped, corner-cutting dialogue that rings true; and a smooth, sometimes elegant, always readable narrative style. Oh, and a continuing erroneous belief, evidence of which I came across many William Haggard books ago, and again this time in the 'patrician' Colonel Russell's 'guards. man's stride'. Guardsmen step out the same thirty inches as infantrymen of the line and all technical troops. Is Mr Haggard quite sure that his colonel was not in the Catering Corps?