THRILLERS
Facts of fiction
PENELOPE HOUSTON
The Penthouse Conspirators Chapman Pincher (Michael Joseph 35s) The Defector Charles CoRingwood (Hart4 Davis 30s) The Diamond Dress Owen John (Cassell 28s) The Hard Trip Alan Dipper (Michael Joseph 30s)
Novels, as Mary McCarthy once lamented, are no longer called on to inform: gone are those chapters about the whaling industry, the Edwardian linen-draper's routine, the politics of Napoleon. But the thriller still takes its instructive duties seriously, always ready—even in the absence of a Len Deighton—to fill us in on the power struc- ture of the KGB or the braking distance of an Aston Martin. It would be interesting to know how many people actually read thrillers less for the action than for this kind of restful fictional factualness. Time-tables and esoteric crossword clueing have gone out; routines of offices and embassies and police stations, the Coronation Street side of spys and crime, are increasingly in.
Chapman Pincher's The Penthouse Conspirators carries this high-powered knowingness as adroitly, usefully and unshowily as one might expect. Not really a thriller, it's more like an ingenious, coolly fictionalised version of one of those in- terminably devious and highly plotted war games, summitry plus Monopoly. Russia and America have reached something of a nuclear rapprochement, leaving Britain's Polaris missiles as the wild joker in the pack. The submarines are mysteriously dogged on patrol by some unidentifiable vessels; a Russian admiral defects and becomes .another strategic pawn in this game of Nato and Whitehall chess, played out at an absorbing level of speculative intelligence. The characterisation is of a fairly minimal Happy Families kind—Mr Bun the Prime Minister, and so on—but it's also rather a relief to get away from all those showy tan- trums in the corridors of power. These con- spirators are power-play experts; as, of course, is Mr Pincher.
Another journalist's thriller from Charles Collingwood,. cas's chief foreign cor- respondent, whose The Defector takes another alliteratively named Tv newsman, Bill Benson, on a professional errand to Hanoi. An old friend in the CIA tricks him into taking charge, in a rather fretful and dithering way, of arrangements for the defection of one Nguyen Van Thanh, Hanoi's Dubcek manqué. The mechanics of the affair seem exceptionally chancy, even by CIA standards, and the plot jerks fitfully towards its conclusion of violence and multi- ple disenchantment, while our man in Hanoi- keeps backing away to his room to down another tumbler of Scotch. But when it comes to the setting, the observant, detached commentator takes over from the hesitant novelist : excellent reporting on the wayward foreign press colony in Hanoi, disconcerting encounters with the effects of bombing, and the philosophy of the unending war.
Lower down the line, some factual background still comes in handy. The Dia- mond Dress spins a tall sort of yarn about plotters trying to smuggle stolen printing plates for a new currency into Britain, via a
dress-box containing a £30,000 jewel-studded number for Harrods's autumn fashion show. The dress's girl escort, after an arduous time in Rome, almost ends up as mincemeat in the Brompton Road's special rubbish disposal unit. But the final rampage around Harrods reads like an inside job (Mr John happens to be Harrods's Staff Controller); and it's no doubt useful to know that in an emergency the shop can seal itself off like a submarine slamming watertight doors.
The Hard Trip is a sterner, stranger chase : about a tetchy middle-aged scientist who finds that a young man in his research laboratory has conic up with the ultimate in mind-deadening tranquillisers, and escapes to the East Pennines with the alarming evidence half a jump ahead of dubiously motivated pursuers. Again, it's the feeling of an auth- entic landscape, the high tops under snow, tough and remote and well off most fictional tracks, which carries a rasping, slightly mad manhunt, in which gunmen keep looming out of the snow. A dreamy ending introduces a formidable lady biologist, and an escape to a prehistoric painted cave. Written with a dogged ferocity, The Hard Trip develops as an authentically odd obsession.
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