NEW THRILLERS AND SF

Desperate men

PETER PARLEY

Zion Road Simon Harvester (Jarrolds 25s) The Bird-Cage Kenneth O'Hara (Victor Gollancz 25s) Take a Pair of Private Eyes J. T. McIntosh (Frederick Muller 25s) Hell is always Today Harry Patterson (John Long 18s) Best American Detective Stories of the Year Edited by Anthony Boucher (Macdonald 28s) Asimov's Mysteries Isaac Asimov (Rapp and Whiting 25s) Under Compulsion Thomas M. Disch (Rupert Hart-Davis 25s) Australia seems to have been unjustly neglected by the thriller writing fraternity- but Geoff Taylor's Day of the Republic should put that right. It is seta few years in the future—no cause for alarm to those who feel helpless outside the present—in the offices of a large Melbourne daily paper on the eve of the decla- ration of an Australian Republic. The new regime is repressively authoritarian, a number of underground movements are resisting the inauguration and the Unicorn, the paper in question, plans to print a last defiant gesture on the morrow. News of the various factions, pirate radios, mutinies and other incidents flood in throughout the day and a 'hot' and 'cold' run of the paper are prepared to fool the censor. Alarming reports of unidentified submarines ringing the coast and the jamming of the radar defence screen give the preparation of tomor- row's paper an added urgency, indeed a definite air of finality, and Mr Taylor manages to sustain a breathless pace right up to the inevitable cata- clysm at midnight. The Unicorn, uncensored and defiant, appears on time but there is no one left to read it.

Simon Harvester has conjured up a fairly convincing agent in Dorian Silk, a rather belli- gerent and decidedly disgruntled expert in Middle Eastern affairs. In Zion Road, the seventh Silk escapade, he finds himself em- broiled in the Arab-Israeli war while pursuing his kidnapped Egyptian mistress. It appears that the Russians, with Egyptian connivance, have prepared a fiendishly half-baked plot to capture prominent rich Egyptians and hold them inside the Israeli border, meanwhile imputing their imprisonment to the Israelis. But Silk, with many a caustic aside on teenage- morality and the demise of all the sterner Anglo-Saxon qualities, effects their rescue against heavy odds .apd certain amount of suspicion from both Ales. Nothing-new here but still a good thriller in the classic mould.

Back to London for an unusually schizo- phrenic tale by Kenneth O'Hara, rather reminiscent of Polanski's film Repulsion. A young doctor is being persecuted by alarmingly irrational telephone calls and mystery parcels.

His ingenuous friend Stephen Hudson deter- mines to unravel the plot and becomes hope- lessly involved with the persecutrix, an attrac- tively weird young woman. It transpires that a missing painting, removed from a private gallery during the liberation of Florence, is the reason for these strange goings-on, and an unfortunate

accidental manslaughter accounts for the doc- tor's disturbance. One by one the characters slip downhill on the much-quoted principle that

madness is contagious, and Stephen Hudson ends up in a far worse predicament than anyone else was in when the book began. After a good start I rapidly lost sympathy with any of the protagonists and felt that the somewhat tiresome hero deserved all he got.

Take a Pair of Private Eyes is apparently a rehash of a television play by Peter O'Donnell.

It is lightweight stuff but a passable quick read.

Ambrose and Dominique are a young couple who drive around in a Mini-moke and devote

themselves to the recovery of stolen goods.

Ambrose's father is a highly successful retired criminal playing complicated paper games of

theft with the high court judge and the police superintendent who tried so hard to put him inside during his working career. This particular frolic concerns the theft and eventual replace- ment of a magnificent Egyptian coffin lid, abun- dantly decorated with gold and precious stones.

All the characters are ineffably jolly and corpses appear and reappear with gay abandon. No one need lose any sleep over the plot but the charac- ters are endearing enough to make quite a good rv'series on the lines of a juvenile Avengers.

Harry Patterson's Hell is always Today is a straightforward piece of police investigation with a pleasantly light touch. A number of girls

have been killed on dark wet nights by a mur- derer dubbed The Rainlover and, to add to the

confusion, a cat burglar and ex-boxer has escaped from the local jail. Needless to say, murderer, burglar and police all become rapidly involved and hopelessly muddled. Worth skim- ming through at the bus stop but no more. Anthony Boucher's anthology, the fifth of the series, has some good items including a clever pastiche of Sherlock Holmes by August Derleth and a very funny spy spoof by James Powell.

This last contains a splendid confrontation between two agents over a café table men- acing each other with, respectively, a pistol disguised as a lighter disguised as a pistol and a sandwich which its owner hopefully claims is a repeater. ` "Perhaps," he said, "and perhaps not. A fifty-fifty chance. How humiliating to be shot by a sandwich." He lowered his pistol-lighter- pistol.

Isaac Asimov is without a doubt one of the masters of science fiction and his new collec- tion of mysteries transgresses none of the rules of the traditional detective story. The puzzles are scientific to be sure, but follow the normal precepts that people cannot disappear, travel in time or walk through locked doors. The.Holmes of many of the stories is a dumpy little extra- terrologist, which I take to mean an expert in other worlds, called Wendell Urth who has an extreme aversion to any form of travel outside his university campus, but manages to put his finger unerringly on the solution every.time. Another collection of science-fiction stories gThomas M. Disch, author of Camp Concen- uion, should not be missed. The stories are macabre, mysterious and demoralising, with a Disturbingly quirky brand of humour. I par- ticularly liked the sinister little tale of a man who goes shopping in a big store where his

credit has finally expired and, taking the down elevator, finds himself still descending after a

week with no energy left to climb the stairs back to the top. Obviously the final solution in a credit-card world.