NEW THRILLERS
Post Bondage
PETER PARLEY
Once in a Lifetime James Mayo (Heinemann 25s) An Impartial Eye Pierre Boulle (Seeker and Warburg 25s) The Munich Involvement Frederick Mullaly (Arthur Barker 25s) Hell is Where You Find It John Welcome (Faber 21s) Ten Days to Oblivion Michael Cooney (Cas- sell 18s) The Blight John Creasey (Hodder and Stough- ton 18s) Walk Softly in Fear Michael Butterworth (John Long 22s 6d) The Word for Love Alan Burgess (Michael Joseph 30s) Far and away the toughest of post-Bond thrillers was James Mayo's Hammerhead, in- troducing Charles Hood, the urbane art dealer agent employed by Circle, an international con- sortium of financiers. His latest assignment, at the harassed request of Kristoby's, the London auctioneers who are being swamped with high- class fakes, is no disappointment. My sym- pathies are entirely with the villain, Franklin Delgado, a millionaire who has been sold so many expensive pups that he decides to return the favour. But the star of the piece is un- doubtedly Sergeant Bannion, a roaring homi- cidal hustler of USAF Teheran, who decides to branch out from rerouting rx stores into the rather more complex shipment of illicit antiquities. Hood takes the assignment at a leisurely pace with time off to appraise Del- gado's fakes and the less dubious charms of his secretary. The plot is an ingenious one and Mr Mayo has the characters at his finger-tips. One incidental delight is the jacket photo- graph: a still life in shades of gin and lime juice.
Pierre Boulle is a writer of diverse talents, author of such disparate works as Bridge on the River Kwai and the more recent Monkey Planet, a Sci Fi fable that didn't quite come off, but will no doubt be improved by the appearance of Charlton Heston on your local wide screen. His new novel has an ambitious theme but somehow fails to gel. The hero, Martial Gaur, a disgruntled ex-war photo- grapher with one leg now, faute de mieux, turned cheesecake photographer, broods over his old snaps and longs for a chance to be in at the kill again. The opportunity is pro- vided by his -conniving mistress and an old enemy from student demo days who are plotting to assassinate the President. Gaur sets the scene for them with every aspect of pic- torial composition taken carefully into con- sideration, but their attempt at assassination is so inept that he is forced to renounce his 'I am a camera' role and take a hand. The final scene is as tense as one could wish for, with the embittered hero stumping frantically across the beach, checking the exposure and fumbling for the dagger all at the same time, but one wonders if the picture was really worth the trouble. M Boulle is also ill-served by a curi- ously wooden translation.
Easily the best thriller I have come across in a long time is Frederick Mullaly's The Munich Involvement. It is subtitled 'A novel of political suspense' and readers of a weak disposition should be warned that the book is both politically and sexually mature, and must be read at one sitting. Political correspondent Bob Sullivan is sent to Germany to investigate a neo-Nazi resurgence under the cover of the Radical Democratic party. Storming through a number of boudoirs with no appreciable lapse in energy, Sullivan trails Fritz Krone, a demagogue of vicious tendencies with an ss Schar of brutis% henchmen, to a cleverly con- cealed bullion hoard intended to finance his breakaway movement. The action has tearaway pace and a solid plot. It should not be missed. Full marks for background information to John Welcome for the latest escapade of Richard Graham, amateur jockey, sportsman and secret agent when financially pressed. The scenes on the race track are worth all the rest of the blood and thunder put together, and Mr Welcome has his finger firmly on the pulse of the gaming stockbroker belt. Marginal pleasures include photographer Raoul de Gracey, late of Hoxton, England, and a superb venue for secret service headquarters at the back of a dirty bookshop, with the director's desk littered with choice samples from down- stairs. If only it were true.
Silliest book in years is Michael Cooney's Ten Days to Oblivion, which features the Queen's Investigator, a hereditary office answer- able to none but the sovereign and dating, so we are told, from 1450. If you think that "is laughable, I might point out that the Russian secretary-general is called Goffis Ossip, surely an anagram, and the characters tear about Europe like the Keystone Cops. In fact, it is bursting with laughs, but I suspect they are largely unintentional.
Equally feeble is John Creasey's The Blight, a juvenile tale of a world-wide tree blight en- gineered by the sinister Lord Wolhampton and quickly rumbled by Dr Stanislaus Alexander Palfrey, known to his collaborators as Sap, which gives rise to any number of ghastly puns in the tree context. The whole thing is best forgotten.
Michael Butterworth's Walk Softly in Fear is a nicely worked out tale of a former maga- zine editor who drifts down in the world to weighing-machine salesman and makes a pain- fully slow comeback, thanks to a little impromptu blackmail of a newspaper tycoon who is having an affair with a minor. As a sop he is offered the editorship of a children's comic horrendously entitled Blubber, but by the end of the book our hero has risen to better things and, incidentally, avenged the murder of an old friend. Mr Butterworth is obviously well acquainted with the magazine world and his characters move easily in this hinterland of journalism.
Far more portentous is Alan Burgess's The Word for Love, a small-town saga of Inspector William Field of the Rhodesian police on trial for the rape of an African housemaid and former rain goddess. Notional ideas of justice, fair play and a duty to his adopted police force tend to confuse Inspector Field, but all is satis- factorily sorted out at his trial, thanks to a clever attorney who makes great play out of the linguistic problems attendant on the word for love. All, regrettably, live happily ever after, but Field's love affair and sense of duty are skilfully handled by Mr Burgess.
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