Thrillers
Harriet Waugh
Base Case Julian Rathbone (Michael Joseph pp. 187, £6.50) Once a Spy Rennie Airth (Jonathan Cape pp. 245, £6.50) Going for Gold Emma Lathen (Victor Gollancz pp. 251, £5.95) Put on by Cunning Ruth Rendell (Hutchinson pp. 208, /5.95) Situation Tragedy Simon Brett (Victor Gollancz pp. 170, £5.95) A Splash of Red Antonia Fraser (Weidenfeld and Nicolson pp. 299, £5.95) To my shame, Base Case is the first Julian Rathbone novel I have read. It is an excellent political thriller with an unexpected and subtle approach. The main surprise lies in the character of its hero, Jan Argand. 1 would guess that Mr Rathbone holds conventionally well-bred liberal views but he has contrived to present sympathetically a hero whose incorruptible nature and belief in the righteousness of the status quo make his contacts with his fellow men hideously uneasy.
Recovering from a nervous breakdown partly caused by this inability to come to terms with venal and politically diverse humans he is sent by EUREAC, a European governmental body, to advise on security in the Virtue Islands where an American nuclear power base is under construction. On his way out to the islands his briefcase is switched with one containing six kilos of heroin and there is a bomb attack in the stop-over airport. As Jan tries to disentangle real danger from paranoic fantasies, the island intrigues catch up with him. These include corruption among construction firms, incipient revolution, antinuclear inhabitants and a literary confer ence embroiling itself in the embranglement. It is a tense drama, made more tense by having a vulnerable hero who gets things wrong as often as he gets them right. Blaney, the hero of Rennie Airth's Once a Spy is also vulnerable (dog-shy) but otherwise has little in common with Jan Argand. He is altogether a more sympathetic and likeable fellow. Blaney was once a young, rather naive British spy, part of an undercover group running a high-up Russian official from West Berlin. Now 17 years after that operation ended in a debacle and he has left the service, someone is killing off the members of the defunct team. 'Why?'
and, 'who is it?' are the questions Blaney has to answer on the instructions of the brutish, genial head of the Secret Service. Blaney reluctantly leaves the security business he owns and runs in the hands of his far too able, beautiful, horsey, female assistant, and rediscovers the murky world of betrayed loyalties and killer guile that he had left behind. The romance between him and his bossy assistant is cleverly handled. She stops him smoking, forces him to eat uncongenial healthy foods, makes him go for long walks in the rain — 'You are not made of salt,' she says — and looks like taking over his business, but seen through his eyes she is an engaging girl. The novel which is funny, convoluted and tense displays more brain than brawn in the telling. One of the considerable pleasures of Opening a new Emma Lathen detective novel, in this case Going for Gold is renewing old acquaintances. As usual the orderly business of the Sloan Guarantee Trust on Wall Street is endangered, this time when a Eurocheque swindle is discovered at its Winter Olympics branch at Lake Placid. John Thatcher, the Sloan's urbane Senior Vice-President, once again finds himself up to the neck in unlikely events as he sets about protecting the bank against forces of anarchy. These involve not only the swindle, but an Olympic skier being shot dead as he makes a practice run, another one being drugged and nearly killed on the slopes, an East European skater demanding political asylum of Brad Withers, the Sloan's warm hearted, bone stupid President, with threatening consequences to his marriage, and quite as many Other unexpected happenings. Emma Lathen, in fact, comprises two women, an economist and a lawyer. Why some people find the novels dull is a mystery. They are funny, elegantly and seamlessly written, the authors never cheat on the reader and the staff of the Sloan give speculative hope to ?lie when dealing with those grey, threatening People who query one's overdraft.
Very nearly as pleasureable to read is Ruth Rendell's new detective novel Put on by Cunning. She is England's premier detective – thriller writer, and her last thriller, The Lake of Darkness deservedly won the National Book Award (f7,500) She excels in both fields, although personally I think her thrillers have individual standing that her highly accomplished detective fiction lacks.
Chief Inspector Wexford, Miss Rendell's familiar detective, is drawn into a case of accidental death when aged widower, Sir Manuel Camargue, a great flautist, dies ostensibly from falling into his pond one snowy night shortly before he is to marry a girl 50 years his junior. Foul play is not suspected by anyone except the bereaved fiancde. However, Wexford begins to think that the flautist's long estranged daughter might be other than what she seems and finds her repellently attractive. His super iors think he is wrong-headed and obsessive but Wexford bloodhounds his way out to California in the quest for truth. There is a marvellous surprise twist three-quarters of the way through involving an unexpected death that turns everything on its head.
Although Miss Rendell does not cheat on the plotting — the clues are present to be picked up if you can (I could not) — there was little satisfaction for this reader in the identity of the murderer when unmasked. The nicest amateur sleuth in the business is Simon Brett's third rate actor, Charles Paris, who is a melancholy happy, soft English soak, and a pleasant change from the tough, macho American-style drunk usually favoured in crime fiction. In Situation Tragedy he comes to suspect that a series of fatal accidents plaguing the pedestrian T.V. sit-corn in which he has a bit-part are murders. Between fighting the urge to pee that afflicts him at inconvenient times, and remembering to report to the studio rather than the bar, he finds time to unravel the deaths of an unpleasant production assistant who falls from the studio fire escape; the dim-wattage, successful script writer who is run over; the desperately keen new director who ends up against a toppled urn; and the floor manager who is brained during an uproarious battle ('glazed chicken wings rediscover flight') between the T.V. crew and underprivileged residents of a street in which they are filming. Bound into the story is some excellent satire on television — aspiring stars turn from being perfectly pleasant people into monsters, union-orientated technicians get served £10 bottles of wine from their mobile canteen and complain, and the producer's job consists in buying drinks for everyone. The book is full of verbal felicities and made me laugh aloud often.
It says a good deal for Antonia Fraser's skill as a story teller that her new detective 'novel A Splash of Red is such fun when its heroine, Jemima Shore, amateur sleuth and worthy television presenter of concerned documentaries, is such a pill. The story is a happy mixture of crime passionel and mildly bizarre arts folk. Jemima borrows the flat of her friend Chloe Fontaine, a beautiful, promiscuous novelist, to get away from it all, only to find after being terrorised by abusive telephone calls and beaten up by one of Chloe's ex-lovers, that Chloe has returned and been murdered. Most of the male characters seem to have slunk from out of a JiIly Cooper romance and then been swiped by our author. Although once or twice I wondered; there is a verbose squatter (one of the suspects) with whom Jemima has a randy encounter who is given to calling women 'Goddess, Psyche and Pallas Athena .
Among this particular batch of unusually well-written novels A Splash of Red stands out as a sturdy, game little pony among thoroughbreds, but in other batches it would have rated pretty high.
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