So now he can be staked out as bait in a three‐nation race for a Jewish scientist, escapee from a Siberian prison camp.ĭorothy Eden's WAITING FOR WILLA (Coward‐McCann, $5.95) is securely in the gothic mold, and it's a particularly comfortable fit-filled, as it is, with romance, apprehension, intrigues, and no mean level of suspense. John Craig is, his boss at Britain's Department K feels sure, over the hill: doc tors and psychiatrists were not able to put him completely to gether again after his last case. I suppose its cyni cism most strongly marks it from the Bondian variety-that, and an absence of mechanical gimmicks. THE INNOCENT BYSTAND ERS (Knopf $5.95) by James Munro is an excellent example of the kind of story line and characters that have evolved out of the Ian Fleming school of espionage fiction: people who are tough and incessantly active, a plot that is endlessly surprising. As soon as Roper stumbles onto the scene in San Francisco, he stumbles over a body, then another, and another, and an Max Roper- this is his debut-is hired by an anxious millionaire whose beautiful daughter hasn't been heard from for quite a while.
But if you like pri vate eyes durable and occa sionally highly motivated, if you like off‐trail characters, buckets of blood and violent downhill action, “Butterfly” is for you (and I confess a kin dred ?weakness). The latter idea is not couched in startling originality in THE PUSHBUTTON BUT TERFLY (Random, $4.95) by Kin Platt. Both are reflections of contemporary concerns: the one, leftover Nazism the other, the disappearance of wayward girls into California flower patches. Two themes in recent de tective fiction are becoming at least strained, if not over worked.
0 kommentar(er)
