NEW THRILLERS
Good clean crime
CYRIL RAY
Bandersnatch Desmond Lowden (Eyre and Spottiswoode 25s) Papa La-Has John Dickson Carr (Hamish Hamilton 25s) Lady on Fire James Michael Ullman (Cas- sell 2k) A Alan Who Cannot Kill J. F. Straker (Harrap 23s) The Long Drop Alan White (Herbert Jenkins 25s) The House of Green Turf Ellis Peters (Collins 210
In nearly forty years of motoring I have never owned anything more powerful than a Volkswagen, anything more 'antique' or 'vintage' than a bull-nosed Morris-Cowley or an open two-seater Swift. And that was in the days when bull-nosed Morris-Cow- leys and open two-seater Swifts were not so antique as all that. And 1 know so little about any of the cars 1 have owned that I would not trust myself to change a wheel.
So it is a measure of James Leasor's skill with his inside stories of the trade in tarted- up antique motor-cars that I was held quite firmly by They Don't Make Them Like Thai Any More, a tale of the pursuit across Spain of a '1937 5.4 litre 450 K super- larged Mercedes'—a car I would not know rum a Fiat 500 if I fell over it—by a dealer in petrol-propelled antiques driving a pre- war ss, which! had thought to be the name of a Nazi military formation. It is the dealer who tells the story, and it is his knowledgeable chatter, between the bouts of action, about the faking and flogging of his stock in trade that makes the book so intensely interesting—not the plot, so loosely crocheted that it takes five pages of monologue at the end, like one of those stories of murder in the country-house library of the nineteen-twenties, to tidy it all up. Or the prose style, either, all smutty wisecracks (some as bull-nosed as my Morris-Cowley). sniggering puns (of which perhaps the best is, 'rose-red titties, half as old as time), and a distasteful way of addressing the gentle reader as 'par.
Recently, in these columns, J. W. M. Thompson quoted `a much-travelled aca- demic friend' as lamenting the decline of the detective story in favour of `porno- graphy or near-pornography or quite pos- sibly pseudo-pornography'. Mr Thompson and academic friend, will be glad to know that in Mr Leasor's book, in spite of the smut and the sniggers, and in spite of the central character's _repeated obsessive (and I should have thought senile) attempts to see 'that tell-tale flash of white thigh' as various young women get in and out of Narious old cars, nobody actually does any- thing to anybody. Not in that way, I mean: only murder.
And in Stanley Hyland's much more urbanely written---indeed, very civilised - tale of spies and high politics. Top Bloody Secret, there is never a woman at all. This is a most engaging tale. though I could have done with rather fewer characters, and found it easier to keep my place if it had been divided into chapters.
Precious little in the way of pornography or even 'pseudo-pornography' (whatever that is) in Desmond Lowden's first novel Bandersnatch, either—a splendidly vigorous, exciting tale of piracy in the Med, with quite a bit of depth in the portrayal of the pirate himself, living on his wits, his effrontery and the memory of having been a swashbuckling M I B captain a quarter of a century ago. The tale is told with such skill and verve that I took every implausibility in my stride.—save one: who ever heard of a naval officer with a moustache? This partic- ular appendage, greying now, is referred to time and again: I could as easily believe in it as adorning the face of an Anglican archbishop.
Similarly sexless, and much more sedate, is Papa Lit-Bas, which John Dickson Carr sets in the New Orleans of the eighteen- fifties, and narrates almost in the style of a novelist of the period. A nice long read, with the historical character. Senator Judah P. Benjamin (later to be the Confederacy's Secretary of War and then a member of the English Bar), solving a mystery that involves Voodoo—Papa Lit-Bas is the Voodoo Satan—and taking twenty pages at the end to explain it all. This, by the way, must be the first novel I have read set in New Orleans that does not devote some pages at least to a Memorable Meal.
In sharp contrast. Lady on Fire, by fames Michael Ullman, is set in Chicago and bang up to date. Bang is the word, or one Of them: one man is pumped full of lead; a woman is clobbered to death; two others are fried to a crisp but, as the News of the
World said of the woman who had been strangled and then cut into small pieces and left in a suitcase, none of the bodies 'had been interfered with'. Good clean crime, in fact, and the faintest possible reminiscence of the flavour of the late, great Raymond Chandler. The name of one of the characters, by the way, is as improbable as that NO'S moustache—O'Bradovitch.
Although there are two queens and a nymphomaniac in J. F. Straker's A Man Who Cannot Kill, we are simply apprised of the fact, not invited to watch. So here, too, is a non-pornographic and virtually non- violent tale--a good one, too, its one or two improbabilities carried lightly by work- manlike writing and skilful plotting. This is Mr Straker's fifteenth crime novel---I praised his fourth in these columns thirteen years ago. He deserves to be better known.
Alan White's The Long Drop is a pretty tough tale of how twelve assorted soldiers were trained as ruthlessly efficient—but expendable—parachutists to take on a for- lorn hope in the Second World War, and how they fulfilled their mission. Again no girls, save for an odd flashback to a fumble on the gun-site. And the love-stuff in The House of Green Turf, by Ellis Peters--all about a lovely English opera-singer and a handsome private detective, solving an un- commonly melodramatic mystery in the Austrian Alps—is on as elevated a plane as Mr Thompson's friend, or the mealiest- mouthed women's magazine, could wish.
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