Thrillers

Harriet Waugh

The Skull Beneath the Skin P.D. James

(Faber & Faber £7.95)

A Spy of the Old School Julian Rathbone (Michael Joseph £7.95)

Insider Out Christopher Hudson (Michael Joseph £7.95) The Fever Tree Ruth Rendell (Hutchinson £6.95) The McBain Brief Ed McBain (Hamish Hamilton £7.95)

knew P.D. James novel is an event that !o aficionados of straight detection look Lard to with uncontained glee. Not only :she set puzzles where readers are forc- ,(311,tionally to change their opinion as to ke-qe 'Prit, but she usually provides at least kithx.tra corpse along the way. Mounting 1/44 he's as necessary to the detective novel irrest. art massage to a man with a cardiac ae)le In her new, excellent novel The Skull 10,atil the Skin she adds another method illow`eP the reader's adrenalin high. She

You to know who is the intended vic-

ut the victim does not cop it for some tht It is the possible fashion of the death kticilertgages the interest of the reader as lkile,,4S the identity of the murderer. P.D. ftii2 is not, however, the reigning queen

genre merely because she tells a good

knotty murder story, for others do that just as well, but because her writing and the in- dependence of her characters are in themselves such a pleasure. It is also par- ticularly pleasing to welcome The Skull Beneath the Skin as it heralds the return of Cordelia Gray, who is the most attractive and sympathetic detective in modern fic- tion. Her only previous appearance was in An Unsuitable Job for a Woman and perhaps we have the filming of that to thank for her comeback. Possibly the reason why P.D. James favours her preten- tious, poetry-writing, Scotland Yard detec- tive, Adam Dalgiesh, over Cordelia is that it is very difficult to present a detective agency in England convincingly in the 1980s. She successfully overcame this obstacle in An Unsuitable Job for a Woman by opening the story with the suicide of Cordelia's part- ner, a seedy and unsuccessful private eye. Cordelia's difficulty in keeping the agency open after this blow was made to seem all too likely. This time P.D. James has more difficulty in setting the scene credibly. She falls back on the cosy teacup tradition of the Forties and Fifties female operator. Cordelia now runs the agency with the less than able assistance of a period spinster and a camp, theatre-struck office boy called Bevis. They chatter together and chase the office kitten. None of this works very well, but then the real story starts. The action takes place on a privately owned island off the Dorset COast where Cordelia is hired to guard and reassure a neurotic, famous ac- tress called Clarissa Lisle who is receiving

nasty quotations from Shakespeare threatening death. Although all her inti- mates consider her to be quite ghastly none of them think that she is seriously threaten- ed. The list of suspects consists of Clarissa's present husband, a military man given to right-wing intrigue and with a mysterious past connected to the island, the host, a pussycat-like man with a macabre taste in Victoriana, his manservant who is very peculiar and wears a wig, a waspish theatre critic, her ex-lover, dying of cancer (has he anything to lose by killing her?), her taciturn dresser whose child died alone in hospital because Clarissa chose not to pass on an inconvenient message (and who is the child's father?), her step-son from a previous marriage, a schoolboy at the mer- cy of her capricious bounty, and a female cousin who desperately needs to borrow money from her (or inherit it). All of these are on the island and none of them wishes Clarissa well. Cordelia goes through a whole gamut of emotion and theories before the truth dawns on her. There are very few flaws in this book.

Julian Rathbone's A Spy of the Old School is a rather uncomfortable novel.

The central character is based on a Blunt

stereotype. Sir Richard Austen is a highly respected archaeologist and director of the

Gold Museum. He has recently published his memoirs, which are written in a silly, In them he writes about his chatty style. left-wing sympathies as though he were be- ing daring and original. The memoirs and Sir Richard's authentic memories are jux- taposed with an MI5 investigation by one of its operatives into Austen's wartime in- telligence work at Bletchley Park. There were known to have been leaks to Russia but this had been put down to a man who went missing during an air-raid. Now 40 years later there is reason to think that those leaks had gone on long after the disappearance of that suspect. The finger points to Sir Richard and soon all sorts of machinations start among the powers-that- be to obliterate the truth.

The story, with its twists and unexpected happenings, is excellent, but it has been written in a hysterically bitter style so that there is no differentiation between the paranoia and crippled personality of its cen- tral character, which is perfectly well ex- plained and acceptable to the reader, the dubious morality of the intelligence service, the corrupt self-interest of industry and government as against the comparative in- nocence of society at large. It adds up to an unacceptably paranoid view of life.

Insider Out by Christopher Hudson is also a spy novel and paranoia is also the fuel that drives it, but in this case it is con- fined to the characters rather than running loose in the writer. Martin Commonor, the Deputy Director of the CIA, is kidnapped while in England by some religious freaks who consider him to be a murderer. They wish to convert him to Jesus and to repen- tance. They physically degrade him and he only accidentally survives their treatment, possibly through the grace of God but cer- tainly through the good detective work of an English police inspector. He has been kidnapped at a sensitive point in American- Israeli relations when the two countries are about to embark on a particularly dubious operation. The kidnapping all but aborts the project and it seems inconceivable to both Commonor and the CIA that the two events could have been unrelated. The CIA half suspect Commonor and bug his mistress and wife, while Commonor, find- ing himself suspected by his friends and colleagues, flails around suspecting everybody in turn of setting him up. A well plotted and plausible thriller.

Two books of short stories by two very different sorts of writers, Ed McBain's The McBain Brief and Ruth Rendell's The Fever Tree and Other Stories, make unexpectedly satisfying reading. Crime short stories are often either clumsy or contrived, with underdeveloped, coarse-grained characters bowed under by the weight of action pack- ed into too few pages. One or two of Ruth Rendell's stories do suffer from artificiality but most of the domestically set ones are ex- traordinarily sinister. She only falters when she leaves the family hearth for outside strangeness. Ed McBain's short stories are set on the streets of New York and involve good and bad policemen, straight detec- tion, gang warfare and petty and not so pet- ty crime. What his stories have in common is the portrayal of animals with human faces in wild urban landscapes. They are razor-edged, with killing twists.