The Astrid Factor Douglas Orgill (Peter Davies 21s)

NEW THRILLERS

Globe plotting

PETER PARLEY

Foreign Exchange Jimmy Sangster (Triton 21s) Skin for Skin Douglas Rutherford (Collins 18s) The Burden of Proof James Barlow (Hamish Hamilton 30s) Gravedigger's Funeral Arthur Arent (Mac- donald 25s) The Invasion John Hay (Hodder and Stough- ton 21s) The Dakota Project Jack Beeching (Jonathan Cape 25s) Five to Twelve Edmund Cooper (Hodder and Stoughton 21s) First off the mark with the Florentine floods, surely a natural for an offbeat setting to may- hem, is Douglas Orgill with his latest thriller The Astrid Factor. Hero is an inept Cockney blackmailer pressed, not too unwillingly, into the service of a scheming, omnivorous, Nordic schoolmistress. The plot, appropriately enough, revolves around Florentine art treasures tucked away as postwar insurance by a local Fascist prince. The ill-matched couple wade through the mud to safety and honourable retirement, but the art treasures are washed away without anyone shedding a tear. It is a book to gallop through without further thought, and a poor follow-up to the same author's excellent Days of Darkness. '

With Foreign Exchange by Jimmy Sangster we are back on familiar territory—Berlin, with the home team playing a snappy game on both ends of the pitch and a very slick triple-cross which leaves the hero marginally in the lead. Villain of the piece is a skeletal figure called Leo Tamir, who is apparently indestructible by most normal agencies but has obviously not followed the intricacies of the plot carefully enough to emerge unscathed at the end. Foreign Exchange can hardly be said to break new ground but it's a professional piece of work with a good deal of incidental wit and a stylish line in dialogue.

Apart from irrepressible blackmailers, art thefts and complicated spy swapping over the Wall, the most popular genre of thriller at present seems to be grand larceny. Two new books tackle this with varying degrees of success. Douglas Rutherford's Skin for Skin is a fairly pedestrian tale of a middle-aged ex- RAF pilot of gentlemanly pretensions who picks up a pimply youth from a second-hand car lot, kits him out with cutaway collar and bowler hat and plans a City robbery. The plot, need- less to say, backfires as the pair are saddled with an irritating suburban nymphet who saw them steal a car and has constant delusions of rape; in due course they are obliged to murder several policemen and a nightwatchman full of post-racecourse Guinness. Much of their ener- gies are expended on the niceties of little-finger crooking and hand-made gloves, but in the end the elderly villain does the decent thing and expiates his debt to society with his ex-officer's pistol, while the pimply youth writes his memoirs in jail. The nymphet, I am glad to say, finally marries her accountant fiancé.

Very different is James Barlow's The Burden of Proof, with a closely observed worm's-eye view of seedy London. Mr Barlow has picked his way carefully among the garbage of London

society and come up with some magnificent specimens: Vic Dakin, a psychopathic hoodlum

turned gang boss and businessman with a

doting and withered old Mum who likes to stuff herself with scampi at the Ritz; Draycott,

the outspoken Labour MP, constantly inveighing

against racialism on ry and defending tediously obscene films in a frantic effort to reach the ministerial saddle; and Lissner, the endearingly

jaded purveyor of special entertainments to gang boss, MP and American tourist alike, who

knows he has just about reached the end of the road. All the characters are variously in- volved, through direct participation, blackmail or fear, in what one of the hoodlums calls 'a nice bit of nonsense'—a wage robbery in a dormitory suburb. Mr Barlow is one of the

most able thriller writers in the business, with an alarmingly acute eye for degenerate quirks of society and a knack of unravelling a plot as complicatedly knit as spaghetti.

The other best buy of the month is Arthur Arent's Gravedigger's Funeral, a first novel by an author well known as a playwright in

America. A soft-living American screen writer picks up an astonishingly literate girl and discovers that a neo-Nazi movement with affiliations in America has set a price on his head. The only feasible explanation seems to be that his brother, a confirmed Nazi believed lost in the war, is still alive and prepared to do anything to conceal the only remaining evi- dence of his Jewish background. Our hero is quickly enmeshed in some involved escapades in Germany, with a lively backcloth of back- street strip-clubs offering artistes on white stallions a la Mazeppa and a splendid female boxing match at the neo-Nazi's country house stronghold. Mr Arent must write more thrillers.

Heading towards the outworld of science fiction we have John Hay's The Invasion. The setting is an Australian outback sheep farm, where a truculent farmer is confronted at long distance with a nuclear invasion by the South East Asian Republic; refugees rapidly appear on the scene, ranging from plump city business- men to practical 'new Australians,' hotly pur- sued by an enemy patrol and an attractive Chinese political supervisor who predictably falls for the laconic sheep farmer. This some- what tedious tale seems an unfortunate waste of what might have been an interesting idea.

The Dakota Project by Jack Beeching is a curious brain drain parable with overtones of Lysisirata. Dic4, Conroy, a smart West End copywriter, is Oveigled into an unspecified government project,in Dakota to revamp com- plex scientific information into acceptable English. Since the inmates of the camp seem totally unaware of the purpose of their work, the only wax, to discover what is really going on is to join the higher echelon. The security chief, Colonel Umber, has a fetish about total security, but eventually the dark secret of the project—ostensibly concerned with mass-pro- ducSd food to avert world starvation—is re- vealed as an inflatable woman to counter over- population. This is a delicious fable, ending with a splendid revolt staged by a militant band of Mexican laundry women and part- time whores which disrupts the whole grandiose project.

Last and oddest is Edmund Cooper's Five to Twelve, a reference not to time but to the ratio of men to women in an age of increased life expectancy and a post-contraceptive feminist paradise. Hero Dion Quern is an anarchic poetaster who enters rather unwill- ingly into an uneasy relationship with a mem- ber of the ruling caste, known as doms—an

abbreviation of domina and suspiciously close to the Soho bookshops' terminology for feminine domination. The action is wild, erratic and thoroughly enjoyable—the frequently em- ployed expletive 'What the Slopes!' being particularly apt. Altogether a bit of fantasy not to be missed.