NEW THRILLERS
Currying flavours
CYRIL RAY
The Gang that Couldn't Shoot Straight Jimmy Breslin (Hutchinson 30s) The Young Prey Hillary Waugh (Gollancz 24s) The Candle-Holders Val Giclgud (Macmillan 25s) A Game for Heroes James Graham (Mac- millan 25s) Illegal Tender Dominic Devine (Collins 25s) Miss Ivory White Raymond Haggard (Collins 25s)
Jimmy Breslin's gang that couldn't shoot straight is a bunch of New York guineas Italians, that is—led by Kid Sally (short for Salvatore), and including Tony the Indian, Beppo the Dwarf, Big Jelly, Bill Mama and Big Lollipop, conducting a feud against Papa Baccala. the Water Buffalo and others within a Mafia that. 'got into American life the same way the Greeks got into Buckingham Palace. They came by boat and worked their way up', and that 'work together as well, and have the same trust in each other, as members of Congress'. Kid Sally's lot are constantly shooting the wrong guy, or being shot or otherwise summarily disposed of themselves in a heartlessly funny farce that will remind readers as old as I am, if such there be, of the pre-war Warner Brothers' film, A Slight Case of Murder. Not quite so po-faced funny as Damon Runyon at his best, but not quite so artificially, present-tense mannered either, this book entertained me highly, yet left me with the feeling that I did not really want to read another one like it for the next twelve months. This is not a moral judgment: it is simply that the flavour is too strong and too individual. In the same way, I like curry, but only occasionally. (I should enjoy even less frequently Big Jelly's favourite tipple: a double Scotch with a large Sauternes on the side, preceded by small triangular red pills from under a chemist's counter.)
Mr Breslin is as amusingly cynical about his New York policemen as he is about the similarly incompetent crooks they try to avoid tangling with too uncomfortably. Hil- lary Waugh's cops in The Young Prey, on .the other hand, are sans pear et sans reproehe, and would be a sight more success- NI in coping with junkies, hippies, kooks, Bowery bums and spades if it weren't for the 'paper-work, for 'guilt-ridden middle-class -whites who feel so responsible for the black man's plight,' and for do-gooders generally. 'Society's to blame', says the author, through the mouth of a lawyer for the defence, that a Negro rapist gets away, literally, with murder —of a white virgin of fifteen, one need hardly say—at the end of a book that leaves a very much nastier taste in the mouth than curry.
I found myself little more in tune with Val Gielgud's The Candle-Holders, in which the sympathetic characters—sympathetic to the author, I mean--constitute 'a veritable frag- ment of old England : the tweeds and the headscarses; the leathery checks and the stiff upper lips: the mixture of shabbiness and good breeding . . . (No, no. I assure you: Mr Gielgud writes this admiringly) whereas murder. espionage. blackmail, and/ or social solecisms-- it is hard to know which is the more frowned upon - are committed by assorted wops, a coroner who is 'a socialist of the most ostentatious type' and disapproves of polo: and a glib Labour minister with patent-leather hair. Buchan- and-bitter lemon, say I, being disqualified as a socialist from commenting on Mr Gielgud's knowledge of polo, the game that serves as ti background to a rather com- plicated plot, the unravelling of which in- °Ives a little-known drug extracted from a Mexican cactus, and a tape recorder cun- ningly concealed.
Echoes of Buchan, too, in A Game for Heroes, a splendidly exciting, insistently readable adventure story of a landing on a German-held Channel Island in the very last days of the war, with a cruel, brave, physic- ally and psychologically scarred British lieutenant-colonel—the narrator-hero—and a chivalrous German sergeant-major both in love with the same girl. They and the other assorted heroes and villains arc, it is true. a little larger than life, but they are characters in the round, not paper tigers, and their nick- of-time adventures on land and sea arc nar- rated with style as well :Is pace. We get little enough, these days. of the high heroic manner: I can warmly recommend this example.
The characters in Illegal Tender are much less convincingly three-dimensional: indeed this sedate, old-fashioned detective story could hardly be more different, set as it is in the council offices of a small Scottish burgh. where the Town Clerk is ass enough to sign his own name, prefaced by 'Mr and Mrs', when he spends nights in a local hotel with a woman colleague: is it blackmail over this, or over some fiddled tenders, that leads to murder? The clues are fairly presented, in the course of a cosy read.
Echoes not so much of Buchan as of Bull- dog Drummond in what I take to be a first novel by Raymond Haggard, who is bare- faced enough with his clichés to begin Ivory White with a bored, handsome, rich young man's advertising in the agony column to 'go anywhere, do anything, must be exciting.' Well, the results are exciting enough for most tastes—those, at any rate, not too demanding about plausibility. There are breakneck chases on ski, bloody battles at sea, and no end of cold-war complications. And not only jiggery, but pokery—two highly personable popsies are bedded before being bumped off. Now I come to think of it. it is unfair to make too much of the Bulldog Drummond parallels—the deputy prime minister in the* story is not at all unlike George Brown and not at all as unlikeable as Sapper would have found him, and the character who had advertised in the agony column finds time between his assignments and his assignations to observe that he is 'always invigorated by just being in London. There was a sense of adventure in the air, a willingness to experi- ment, the carefree excitement of a country that was at last escaping from the control of a bigoted, puritan church. A country where the health of old ladies in Battersea had be- come more important than the name by which God was known in Africa.'
Very heartening. after Mr Giclgud and Mr Waugh.
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