One theory of why English novelists do so well with suspense fiction centers on the very fabric of their society. A lingering class system at home and the recollection of a farflung empire abroad offer unique venues for tales of murder, espionage and intrigue. Four London-based novelists-two well-known, two emerging-bring those English touches to their current offerings with varying degrees of success.
I was somewhat leery when I picked up Ken Follett`s Night Over Water
(Morrow, $22), in which the author looks backward to the opening days of World War II. A mixed manifest of passengers boards a Pan Am clipper for the 30-hour journey from Southhampton to New York. Was this to be an airship-of-fools allegory or, worse, ”Airport `39”?
”Night Over Water” is neither. It`s a top-flight tale of a people and a time in which Follett adds equal dashes of nostalgia and romance to classic suspense and intrigue. Best of all, his passenger list of characters is drawn with clarity and skill. There`s a family of fascist English gentry departing Britain not because of Hitler but because they openly support his anti-Semitism. Their daughter Margaret doesn`t embrace their politics but yearns to embrace Harry Marks, an adroit cockney jewel thief.
Add to this an American gangster being returned home for trial, a famous atom scientist fleeing the Nazis, a flight engineer with a kidnapped wife, a bored woman who`s somewhat reluctantly leaving the husband who appears on board with another woman after the clipper lands in Ireland and one has a potboiler that neatly simmers along. And, for those who appreciate the romance of long-departed flying machines, Follett`s love affair with the great Pan Am clipper aircraft adds another nice touch.
In The Deceiver (Bantam, $21.50), Frederick Forsyth doesn`t even try to give us a new handle on the spy game. He merely uses the flashback to loosely stitch together four incidents from the career of British agent Sam McCready, known as The Deceiver. McCready is being forced into early retirement in a precedent-setting move to rid the British intelligence service of its now superfluous field agents. But McCready refuses to depart willingly. He demands a hearing before his masters at which his past cases are offered as testimony to his worth.
Of these, only the last tale is worthwhile, a good yarn delivered with a touch of humor in which McCready saves a Caribbean island from both drug dealers and Fidel Castro`s unlikely expansionism. What is most outrageous about ”The Deceiver,” though, is that all four stories already have appeared as made-for-cable-TV movies written by Forsyth. To me, this is true
”deception,” presenting ”The Deceiver” as ”Forsyth`s newest work”
when it is nothing more than repackaged film scripts.
The best of our English foursome is Michael Dibdin`s extraordinary sixth book, Dirty Tricks (Summit, $18), which is as sophisticated, as chilling and, for its dark humor and wry observations, as bone-dry as brut champagne.
The unnamed narrator of Dibdin`s tale is a teacher at a private language college in Oxford, recently returned to England from years overseas and stunned to see how his homeland and its up-market economy have passed him by. Quickly learning he`ll never be a PLO (People Like Ourselves) in Tory society, Dibdin`s anti-hero readily admits to becoming a ”ruthless self-seeker” as he beds, weds, deceives and eventually kills those who obstruct his path to the status that, he says, the English most equate with money.
”I was well aware that I was only regarded as natural partner for Alison because I had money,” he muses. ”Cash alone wouldn`t have made me acceptable, of course, but no charm, wit or patient attention to tedious monologues and appreciative laughter at stale jokes would ever make up for the lack of it.”
Dibdin`s narrator tells his chilling story in the form of a deposition to block his extradition from a Latin American dictatorship, asking readers to be his court as he speaks in a cool, sarcastic voice of complete moral and spiritual detachment. An insightful portrait of the manners and mores of Thatcherian England, ”Dirty Tricks” is also a masterly exploration of the darkest chambers of the human heart.
The Racket by Anita Mason (Dutton, $19.95), a short, tightly written novel, is set in a rural village in southeastern Brazil-a nation ”born out of plunder” whose native Indians and forests are being destroyed for profit, and where babies are sold like cattle.
Rosa, a tough-minded history teacher, and her cousin Fabio, who`s fleeing the streets of Rio where he`d progressed from urchin to mob underling, each end up fighting a noble battle in an ignoble land. Rosa takes on the local robber-baron, Roberto Bandeira, whose penchant for cross-dressing proves to be his Achilles high-heel, while Fabio saves a child-for-sale from Cesar, a vicious, Rio-based gang boss.
Mason surely has studied her Graham Greene. Her prose is soft and understated, almost as if one were eavesdropping on a confessional. She uses the backdrop of a steamy Brazilian village as a setting where the basics of sin and redemption can be viewed without frills. But what made Greene a master is what`s missing in ”The Racket”-its characters reveal neither the sense of despair nor the moral crises that could elevate their story to one of drama and passion.
