Thrillers
Harriet Waugh
Rumpelstiltskin Ed McBain (Hamish Hamilton pp. 241, £6.95) Blood Games Christopher Leach (J. M. Dent pp. 228, £6.95) The Care of Time Eric Ambler (Weidenfeld & Nicolson pp. 250, £6.50) The Winter Touch Clive Egleton (Hodder & Stoughton pp. 238, £6.95) Double Red David Jordan (Andre Deutsch pp. 156, £5.95) The Seventh Raven Peter Dickinson (Victor Gollancz pp. 192, £4.95)
One of the main problems for the writer of straight detective fiction can be the attachment of readers to the personality and quirks of his detective long after the author has become bored and disenchanted with him. Conan Doyle tried to kill Sherlock Holmes off but was forced to resurrect him when the city went into black arm bands; others, such as Agatha Christie, Delano Ames and Erie Stanley Gardner introduced new detectives to their readers with uneasy results. Delano Ames exchanged his delightfully funny couple Dagobart and Jane Brown for a dim sergeant in the Spanish Civil Guard; Agatha Christie gave us Miss Marples who never really caught on in the same way as Hercule Poirot and Erie Stanley Gardner, writing under the name of A. A. Fair, gave us Lam and Cool detective agency. Personally I found Donald Lam a less wooden invention than Perry Mason but, for all that, A. A. Fair is no longer famous while Erie Stanley Gardner is still with us.
Now Ed McBain appears to be joining the ranks of those in retreat from their popular detective and, for the second time, has sneaked in a novel with a worldly, divorced, New York lawyer called Matthew Hope as our eyes, nose and intellect. He is a poor substitute for Steve Carella and the 87th Precinct. The plot of Rumpelstiltskin involves Matthew Hope in kidnap and murder when a sexy singer is bludgeoned just after he leaves her bed and her six year old daughter is abducted. From being a suspect he becomes the confidant of the police. Other suspects abound. A fortune attached to the child is at stake and the dead woman's ex-husband and father tilt with each other for control. Hope disentangles the strands and comes up with the answer. The hero is irritatingly facetious, his relationship with the policeman in charge of the case is unlikely and his girlfriend slows up the action as she plays no real part in it. It may still be all right for wives to be a passive ingredient in detective novels but not girlfriends. Disappointing.
Blood Games by Christopher Leach gives considerably more satisfaction. The central figure is sympathetic and unusual. He is a travel and time weary gospel preacher.
Despairing of the power of words to touch modern man, he stops off in a country town in Texas and has a cross made which he in tends to drag (on runners) silently across America. The town is in the grip of paranoia after a series of sadistic murders and the preacher, a stranger, is not greeted warmly. Then two more murders are committed drawing the preacher into a vortex of horror. The characters are real and individual, their feelings matter and the tension is palpable until you meet the killers. At this point the novel loses some of its impact. The writer strains at understanding the relationship between the killers but only succeeds in producing an unattractive whiff of sentimentality. All the same, one could wish that most thriller writers had half Mr Leach's talent.
Eric Ambler's The Care of Time gets off to a good start with our hero, Robert Halliday, a ghost writer with intellectual pretensions, receiving a card informing him that the writer of it has sent him a bomb in the post. He gives his reasons as 'First, to make it clear I am someone to be taken seriously. Second, to demonstrate my personal integrity. Third, to ensure, with my unorthodox initial approach, your careful consideration of proposals that will be put to you later on my behalf.' The bomb duly arrives, our hero takes it seriously and is ostensibly hired to edit the memoir of a long dead anarchist and to ghost the modern memoir of a dubious German security expert who blows bubbles in the Arabian caldron. In fact, as an ex-member of SIS, he is wanted as a messenger boy between Nato Intelligence and an Arab wildman ruler. The tension is supposed to be generated by the attempts of a terrorist organisation to wipe out the sinister but sympathetic German trouble-shooter and security expert. However, this aspect of the novel does not work very well. The action and motives are not plausibly plotted, the characters are not sufficiently developed for one to mind about their fate, and the ending is ridiculous. Recommended for those who like plenty of action that will not disturb their heart beat.
Clive Egleton's The Winter Touch has all the virtues of excellent plotting and rising tension that The Care of Time lacks. The story takes us back to the Suez Crisis and Hungarian Rising of 1956; Charles Winter, our smooth SIS spy, newly appointed Deputy Control and eager to flex his muscles, starts an illegal, undercover operation aimed at blackmailing Eisenhower into non-interference should England and France decide to invade Egypt. He has evidence forged that Eisenhower's relationship with Kay Summerton, a wartime VV'AC, continued some years after the war. He then deliberately lays a trail for the CIA to follow using a young, slightly discredited agent called Hedley as bait. Things start to go dangerously wrong, though, when the KGB begins taking an interest. Even so, Charles Winter succeeds in pulling one plum from out of the smoking pie. Highly recommended for those who like to be surprised.
A novel with a less satisfactory ending is David Jordan's Double Red. Until then, despite an unlikeable, chippy hero it is fun. Thomas Kane, an ambitious American abroad in English banking is put on to the job of investigating an unknown terrorist organisation's attempt to blackmail his staid merchant bank over some dubious dealings that it was involved in before the revolution in Russia. Disclosure of the dealings would jeopardise the bank's present negotiations with the Russian Government over a fortune in pre-war bonds. There is a deadline, kidnapping, torture and an ancient Russian ballerina in the stew, and the action takes you from London to Liechtenstein, New York and Italy. Sadly the author stops trying at the end and winds it all up absurdly.
Peter Dickinson, usually reliable to keep the reader intrigued with his bizarre plots and humour, has come up with a disappointing one this time in The Seventh Raven.
A children's operatic Society is invaded by South American guerrillas wanting to kidnap a diplomat's son who is taking part in the opera. The story is about their attempts to coerce and cajole the whereabouts of the boy from the children who are hiding him in their midst. The action is seen through the eyes of a teenage girl helper who is not a sufficently complex character to carry the novel, and the story is too simplistic. Children should enjoy it.
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