Thrillers
Harriet. Waugh
The Last Supper Charles McCarry (Hutchinson £8.95)
A Flaw in the System R.B. Dominic (Macmillan £6.95)
The Name of Annabel Lee Julian Symons (Macmillan £6.95)
Murder Post-Dated Anne Morice (Macmillan £6.50)
Exterminating Angels Peter Dunant (Andre Deutsch £7.95)
Charles McCarry is an impressive writer who has not so much taken on Le Larre's mantle as turned it inside out (it has been getting a bit worn recently) and given it a good clean. Why his name is not as well known as John Le Cane's is a mystery. The Last Supper is a powerful novel ranging from the 1920s through to the 1970s in which the rise of Nazism, the Second World War, McCarthyism and the war in Vietnam are the backdrop to the internal goings-on of an intelligence unit called 'The Outfit'. The Outfit is set-up during the Second World War and Hubbard Christopher, the first of our two heroes (the second being his On Paul) is an American, recruited because he has an excellent reason for wanting to be in Germany during the war. His wife Lori, dn. upper-class, bohemian German has usaPpeared and he wishes to find into which hell-hole the Nazis have put her. His quest for her is obsessive and eventually leads to his betrayal and death after the war when he is the head of The Outfit in Berlin. Since The Outfit is run on an old boy net- work, Paul, Hubbard's son, is recruited in his turn.
The novel opens half-way through the story with the gunning down of Paul's girl friend. Of course there is a mole, but who he is and what his motives are, and why the Christopher dynasty should be the victims of a Judas is the nub of the plot. It is a novel with considerable breadth of vision and, as plots go, I remember few that are more gripping, complex or satisfactorily resolved than this one.
It is always a pleasure to welcome Emma Lathen under any guise and although I do not warm to her senator/hero, Ben Staf- ford, as much as to John Putnam Thatcher, she still tells a good story laced with humour and mild satire when writing as R.B. Dominic. In this one, A Flaw in the System, Ben Stafford becomes involved with a constituent's son who has been blam- ed — a pilot's error — for the crash of a new experimental fighter plane. Gradually Ben becomes convinced that there is a cover-up going on between the airforce and the company that owns the plane. It needs another crash, two deaths and Congress a-buzz with rumour before Ben is prepared to put his mind to unmasking the villain. If the cast of possible murderers is a trifle nar- row, and the outcome not entirely left to Ben's 'little grey cells', it is still an attrac- tively written yarn.
Julian Symons's new crime novel The Name of Annabel Lee is the story of an obsession. A reclusive English academic on an American campus is seduced by a zany English bad hat called Annabel Lee. Dudley Potter, the academic, has lived an almost celibate life since his fiancee emotionally castrated him by running off with his father. His renaissance of feeling is therefore all the more dramatic when An- nabel Lee's solicitor. I guessed the solution, months later, she departs, leaving a cryptic message behind. He goes in search of her in England. Soon he is involved with murder, a fortune, sibling rivalry, drugs and the peculiar marriage of a friend who is An- nabel Lee's solicitor. I guessed the solution which is a little too gothic for satisfaction. Also the book reads awkwardly. This might be due partly to the dreadful print. For some reason there are two spaces or more between each word which gives the prose a disagreeable appearance and probably con- tributes to a feeling that this novel is less well written than usual.
Murder Post-Dated by Anne Morice is of the pussy cat variety. Tessa Crichton, Anne Morice's actress detective, becomes involv- ed in two mysterious happenings among the middle-classes in an Oxfordshire village.
A man, not much liked by his neighbours but the saving grace among an unmemorable cast for the reader, appears to have mislaid his wife. He says she is visiting a cousin, but gossip soon has it that he has done her in. Then a middle-aged doctor's alcoholic wife apparently sets herself alight one night and is burned to death. Tessa, an agreeable heroine, moves about the district sowing seeds of discord with deliberately maladroit gossip. She not only finds a connecting link between the two happenings but solves them. Although it is difficult to remember who people are, enough happens to keep the reader mildly entertained until the end.
After this blancmange there was some
relief in turning to Exterminating Angels by Peter Dunant. His novel is a tale of ter- rorism in contemporary Britain. A group of urban revolutionary terrorists, dedicated to such good works as turning a racist politi- cian black or blowing up a property speculator's home, become dangerous when they kidnap a young woman and her baby. (The woman is the daughter of a baby-food magnate.) The gang film the baby wasting away, to the despair of the mother as it is fed over-diluted milk powder. This is a demonstration to show evil commercialism in the Third World. Un- til this moment, the authorities (all baddies) have tolerated the existence of the group as licensed jesters. Now things change, and as the group comes under increasing pressure, one of the women begins to identify with the innocent mother of the baby. The gang's cohesion starts to dissolve and they become vulnerable. Although the attitude of the writer, that all people who are rich and powerful are monsters, is irritating, this feeling fades as the story progresses. There is real excitement, the agony of the mother is well handled and the ending is icily con- vincing.
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