Five thriller writers at their best
Harriet Waugh
Dick Francis' annual treat for his admirers is out, and it is a good one. The story races along without any phoney plotting to slow it down. The hero of Straight (Michael Joseph, £12.95, pp. 288) is an aging steeplechaser called Derek Franklin who finds he has inherited his much older brother Grenville's gem busi- ness after he has died in an accident. He only knew his brother slightly and knows nothing about gems. However, since he is temporarily on crutches, owing to a bad racing fall, he decides to spend his time sorting out his brother's affairs, which include a married mistress, two racehorses and the business itself, employing about six people. There is trouble ahead. People constantly clobber him over the head, there are two million pounds worth of missing diamonds which, unless they can be recovered, could mean the business going bust, and then there is the curious behaviour of Grenville's trainer. In fact there is so much sculduggery around, and Derek receives so much physical damage, that I began to wonder whether he would be able to ride again. However, Derek is a Real Man and takes it all in his stride until he has everything neatly unravelled. This is one of the most enjoyable books Dick Francis has written in years, and for once (unlike the other crime novels I am review- ing) the villian is arrested and taken off to face justice. Much more satisfactory.
Peter Dickinson's novel, Skeleton-in- Waiting (Bodley Head, £10.95, pp.160) is a splendid affair. It takes an imaginary royal line from King Edward VII and places its members in a contemporary setting, with Mrs Thatcher as Prime Minister. The reigning monarch is Victor II, who is married to Isabella of Spain. The king is well-meaning and professional, but in- clined to be a bit irascible. He has two children. The first is Albert, Prince of Wales, who is married to his cousin, Sophia Windsor. Sophia is an unhappy, possibly schizophrenic, compulsive eater and bolter. The second is Louise, who has married a commoner. Louise is the heroine.
The plot has two strands: one concerns the papers and correspondence of the late mother of the king, the Grand Duchess Maria Romanov, a wicked old bat still determinedly making trouble from beyond the grave; the other is about a terrorist plot aimed against a member of the royal family. As Louise goes about her royal duties of opening things, attending the premier of The Last Emperor and making speeches, as well as nappy-changing and breast-feeding her beloved baby Davie, she tries to bring pressure on her dead grandmother's brow-beaten ex-compan- ion, Aunt Bea (who lives in a grace-and- favour apartment in Hampton Court) to hand over her grandmother's papers to the palace. Unfortunately, Aunt Bea has come under the influence of another steely Rus- sian anigree, a mysterious old woman called Mrs Walsh, who looks suspiciously like the late Grand Duchess. She also lives in a grace-and-favour apartment, next door to Aunt Bea. Louise has to decide just how sinister she is.
She starts to delve into her past. The more she learns, the less she knows. For instance, why did Mrs Walsh's husband, the gallant colonel who rescued her from certain death during the revolution, make up his memoirs? And why does Mrs Walsh look so like her grandmother? Then there is the other strand to the story, about which Louise knows nothing. Why is some member of Louise's entourage reporting on her movements, and who is threatened — Louise or young Davie? How is all this going to be tied up with Mrs Walsh and her grandmother's malicious correspondence? Well, Mr Dickinson does tie it up in a bundle, after a fashion. Skeleton-in- Waiting is well written. The awful claus- trophobic quality of royal life is nicely drawn and the novel is more entertaining and involving than its basic plot promises.
L. M. Shakespeare's second novel about Lloyd's of London is both more difficult than her first, Utmost Good Faith, and less traditionally plotted. The Gentlemen's Mafia (Macdonald, £11.95, pp. 240) de- scribes a massive insurance scam of the sort that has recently come to media attention and should by now be becoming familiar to our courts, but as yet has not. This novel explains why it might be difficult to bring such establishment criminals to justice. The central character and villain of the story is a highly successful maverick under- writer. You will have to take on faith that James Ross-Gilbert is very wicked because I am too pea-brained to explain exactly what he and his partners were up to. My difficulty in understanding financial malefi- cence makes me feel sympathetic to jurors sitting on fraud cases; perhaps it would be better if there were specialist courts to deal with them..
It is not, however, necessary to the enjoyment of this book — although it may enhance it — to understand the intricacies of the financial shenanigans. The novel shows how Ross-Gilbert succeeds, against a background of mounting suspicion, in siphoning off money" from his syndicate's portfolios. When he finally takes flight he leaves the members of the syndicate, who have trusted him, bankrupt. The second half of the novel involves the efforts of three people to bring him to justice. They are a bankrupted aristocrat, who goes after him with a gun, his cousin Celia, a clever, pretty, rather drunken one-time broker who wishes to save her relative from being had up for murder, and Mal, a trouble- shooter from Shipping Investigation Secur- ities who wishes to recover the money for Lloyd's. Mal and Celia team up. Celia makes an engaging heroine and saves Mal's life on a number of occasions. L. M. Shakespeare succeeds wonderfully in mak- ing an enjoyable adventure crime yarn out of some pretty complex stuff. This is no mean achievement. The successor to Gorky Park is now with us. Polar Star (Collins Hamill, £12.95, pp. 384), Martin Cruz Smith's second novel starring Arkady Renko, one-time senior investigator in Moscow's Prosecutor's office, gives in-depth insight into Russia's fishing fleet. Poor Renko, who after his activities in Gorky Park is spending his depleted energy in avoiding the long arm of Moscow, is working on board the Polar Star, a Russian fishing boat. He has the most menial of jobs, as a member of 'the slime line'. Those on the slime line work in pairs: The first pair slit fish bellies open to the anus; the second pair sucked out livers and guts with vacuum hoses; the third pair washed slime from the skin, gills and cavities with salt water jets; the last pair vacuumed the fish a final time and laid the trimmed and dressed result on a belt moving towards the freezers. In the course of an eight hour watch the gutting and spraying spread a mist of blood and wet pulp over the belt, workers and walkway.
Renko is rescued from this when a female member of the kitchen staff turns up dead in the fishing nets. The captain pulls Renko out of the slime line and sets him to work finding out why she died. The girl's death takes on a political dimension when Renko discovers that she has distri- buted her favours freely, not only to the men on board the Polar Star but also to their American fishing partners on board The Eagle. The KGB and every member of both crews wish the death to be written off as an accident or suicide. Renko decides otherwise, and soon finds that he is about to become the second murder victim.
The novel is densely written, and the fish, if you can take them, lend an unusual- ly rough, authentic background to the action. Nobody is taken away in handcuffs to face civilian justice. Instead, as has now become the convention in such novels, the baddies contemplate their villainy and fate for about five seconds before death grabs them. The detective hero goes home to await another book or, as in the case of Renko, disembarks to an uncertain future (and we hope another book).
I have always had a particularly soft spot for Tony Hillerman's good-looking and reflective Navajo detective, Jim Chee. Jim Chee is an Indian tribal police officer and in A Thief of Time (Michael Joseph, £11.95, pp. 224) he teams up with Lieut- enant Joe Leaphorn, another Navajo police officer, to investigate the case of a missing woman who is a ceramics expert. It becomes gradually apparent as the bodies mount up that her disappearance and possible death has to do with illegal archaeology taking place on ancient Indian sites. Jim Chee and Joe Leapman come to the case from different angles, and from their separate investigations each arrives at the villain. There are plenty of suspects and the solution is both dramatically and — increasingly rare — intellectually satis- fying.
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