NEW TITRILLERS
Foreign affairs
PETER PARLEY
The Salzburg Connection Helen MacInnes (Collins 30s) The Tremor of Forgery Patricia Highsmith (Heinemann 30s) A Pride of Heroes Peter Dickinson (Hodder and Stoughton 21s)
The Take-Over Men John Wainwright (Collins Crime Club 21s)
Dossier IX Barry Well (Hamish Hamilton 25s) The Clash of Distant Thunder Alfred Maria (Heinemann 25s)
Helen MacInnes is very fond of the location novel. We have already had The Venetian Affair, North from Rome and Decision at Delphi, and now The Salzburg Connection brings us somewhat further north but still well within the range of the package tour holiday. Her plots are invariably as twisty and opaque as her heroes are broadshouldered and thoroughly transparent. Bill Mathison. an American lawyer, is sent to Austria by an American scientific publishing house to sort out a strange commission for a book of views of the Styrian lakes which their local representa- tive appears to have arranged. The commission, needless to say, is a cover for all kinds of skul- duggery and the local agent merely the head of one among innumerable local spy rings, all anxious to obtain or destroy, depending on their political convictions, a tin box containing lists of Nazi sympathisers which has been retrieved from the darker recesses of a lake. Poor Bill, gallant, gullible and as American as blueberry pie, falls into the clutches of the beautiful Rus- sian spy, is constantly thumped over the head by Nazis old and new, and blatantly exploited by a group of grey-faced CIA agents. After 380 pages the enemy are routed and Bill drives into the sun with a rather po-faced lady from the publishing house. I found the novel far too long, but Miss Maclnnes's fans will not be dis- appointed.
The Tremor of Forgery is not strictly a thriller, though a peripheral character does meet a violent death. But the tension is stretched
unmercifully through a plot of extreme simpli- city. Howard Ingham arrives in Tunisia expect- ing to work on a film script, but the producer fails to appear from New York and Ingham has no word from him or from the girl friend he left in the us. Days go by and his anxiety in- creases, but the rather soporific pull of the climate and two new-found friends—Jensen, a Danish painter, and Adams, an American firmly persuaded of the benefits of Our Way of Life and known as owL—induce helpless lethargy in Ingham. His horizon gradually narrows to life
on the beach, meals in the local tavern, endless conversation with owl, and Jensen, and con- stant beseeching glances at the hotel pigeonhole for news from home.
The news, when it arrives, is highly disturb- ing. Meanwhile, Ingham has acquired a new and nagging source of anxiety which eventually ruins any peace he might have found. A local Arab sneak thief attempts to break into his bungalow and Ingham heaves a typewriter at him with fatal consequences. The body dis- appears and Ingham is left prey to harrowing uncertainties; the relationship of the four characters is explored with enormous care, and Miss Highsmith manages to strike a note of continually unnerving suspense without any of the usual props.
Peter Dickinson's Detective Superintendent Pibble is fast becoming my favourite policeman.. His second adventure, after a very creditable start in Skin Deep, takes him to a stately home run on business-like American lines and hous- ing -a blustery pair of old military men, who once staged a dramatic though disastrous com- mando raid in the war which earned them the undying love of the populace. Pibble is sent to investigate the death of an ancient sailor valet who apparently committed suicide while in the midst of model-making. It soon transpires that one Of the old boys has been impersonating the other, who has disappeared, and Pibble's homely suspicions are rapidly aroused. Complications come with the marvellously elaborate manage- ment of the house and grounds, which offers a mock duel with carefully bent pistols, a model ' railway on the lines of Stephenson's Rocket, and a splendid souvenir shop, run by a delectable creature with a mob cap and twisted eighteenth century vowels, where the tourists can purchase scale model gallows. More sinister is a gothic folly lion-pit housing a genuine man-eater, and an ancient bone crushing machine in an out- house. Pibble treads carefully through this august household with one covetous eye on the souvenir shop girl and the other firmly fixed on the unpredictable lion. A Pride of Heroes is excellent stuff, and bursting with imagination, for anyone with a strong sense of the ridiculous.
Closer to the Bulldog Drummond stakes is John Wainwright's Ex-Detective Sergeant Pewter, a cantankerous and scarred ex-police- man with no respect at all for his former superiors and a genuine love of money. Pewter, now an unsuccessful private eye, is inveigled into a dubious attempt to expose a group of ' financiers and businessmen (the take-over men of the title) who have moved into crime on a national scale. The plot backfires and Pewter finds himself responsible for the murder of two policemen. I found all the characters uniformly unsympathetic and somewhat larger than even fictional life, nor did the activities of the take- over men seem any clearer by the book's end.
Dossier IX is pure fantasy and to be read at great speed: an Israeli agent, working un- accountably for British intelligence, is sent rat- - ding round Europe to find an escaped traitor and uncovers a sinister atom theft. Good scenes on France's canal network and a splendid vil- lain who keeps his lady victims floating in for- malin in a wall-sized aquarium, like some Miami underwater leg show: 'An unfortunate weak- ness—necrophilia' mutters one of the agents.
Israeli agents are obviously in vogue at pre- sent and Alfred Mann's The Clash of Distant Thunder boasts a selection of them. Another frantic chase round Europe, this time in pursuit of a double agent who has yet another list of neo-Nazis and their backers, with long pauses for reminiscing about he wartime torture en- dured by the hero at the hands of the ss. There is the usual complement of car chases, fisticuffs at the top of the Eiffel Tower and sinister old ladies-with syringes. A passably good read but short. measure- for connoisseurs of the absusd.
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