Ought to know better by now

Jonathan Mantle

THE DECEIVER by Frederick Forsyth

Bantam, £14.99, pp.415

MAMISTA by Len Deighton

Century, £14.99, pp.360

Spy novelists, like spies, have to be adaptable beyond the point of amorality if they are to prosper. The replacement of the undercover agent by the overhead satellite, the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the coming of glasnost have meant that successful new spy writers are synonymous with new locations. The older hands, mean- while, like the older spies, are looking dan- gerously vulnerable to rust.

John Le Carre, in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, wrote the best spy novel ever. Thirty years later he succeeded with The Secret Pilgrim because he gave the Cold War and its warriors the elegiac treat- ment. Unlike Le Cure, Forsyth and Deighton have never aspired to the status of 'literature', but like him the feeling is that with each new book their licenses come up for renewal.

Forsyth in particular has chosen to make his excursion into the field of the spy novel at a time when others, including Deighton, are departing from it, In The Deceiver Forsyth enters well-trodden territory — although not previously well-trodden by Forsyth. Four interlinked stories describe the later career of Sam McCready, a tradi- tional fielcinnan ill at ease behind a desk at Century House.

McCready is in the style of Bernard Sampson, hero of Deighton's Hook, Line and Sinker, but with Forsyth it is always the plot that matters. A West German SIS agent makes one last run into the Eastern bloc, but unknown to McCready, he has his own secret agenda. A high-ranking Soviet officer defects — is he a traitor or a plant? A former SAS officer tries to penetrate a conspiracy between Libya and the IRA — will he succeed? A British colonial gover- nor is murdered in the Caribbean and McCready investigates. Whodunnit?

As ever with Forsyth, there is a blizzard of acronyms — SIS, CIA, MI6, MI5, GRU, KGB, NVA, ETA, SSD, RPG-7, BMW, even NAAFI, and he seems less eager to explore McCready's character than he is to let you know that he knows that the Special Forces Club is at the end of Herbert Crescent. This knowingness, which worked so brilliantly in The Day of the Jackal, depends upon the absence of naivetes.

This is where Forsyth slips up and blows his cover — the real-life CIA man taken hostage and murdered in Beirut was William, not Richard Buckley. SAS men from the second world war are 'still buried down there in the desert' — I know this is Frederick Forsyth, but even dead SAS men surely do not ever climb out of their graves and walk away. While in the Caribbean, a Foreign Office man 'poured himself a glass of chilled Chablis' — well, it would be, wouldn't it?

Mrs Thatcher, Bernard Ingham, Charles Powell and Douglas Hurd all make know- ing cameo appearances. Jeffrey Archer, who does not, should alone be allowed to do this sort of thing, for his naivete and knowingness are so great that he can be expected to know no better.

Len Deighton's Mamista is not a spy novel, and according to the blurb writer 'opens a new era for the adventure novel'. Deighton is refreshingly LOA (Low On Acronyms) and high on interest in the characters he creates, whose behaviour determines the action of the novel rather more than some dehumanised plot. His linking of the priorities of American foreign policy with the President of the United States cutting himself shaving shows a particularly deep insight.

His hero, Ralph Lucas, however, like Sam McCready, has been ritually cast in the mould. McCready's wife died of multi- ple sclerosis. Lucas's wife has left him, come back, only to be killed in a car crash. It is bad news in both these books to be a woman — you are wheelchair bound, shot dead, betrayed, made into an alcoholic — while the men, though also beaten sense- less, tortured to death and strung up from poles, at least stay in luxury hotels and eat the best food.

Forsyth's locations tend generally to have all the extremes of a luxury holiday pack- age. Deighton's evocation of Spanish Guiana is at least sufficiently powerful for me to lose all desire to go there. Both these immensely rich and successful authors can (literally) afford to reassess the ideas that made them what they are. But while Deighton may never write a book as good as The Day of the Jackal, Forsyth is getting worse by sticking to an outmoded genre. Deighton, on the other hand, if he can just give up the adverbs, can get even better.

'Did your husband disagree with you?'