NEW THRILLERS

True grue

PETER PARLEY

The Short Night Ronald Kirkbride (Arthur Barker 25s.) A Traitor's Crime Roderic Jeffries (The Crime Club 18s)._ Pimpernel 60 Peter Kinsley (Michael Joseph 25s) Sign on for Tokyo Alec Haigh (Heinemann 25s) The Man Who Killed Too Soon Michael Underwood (Macdonald 21s) Rotnan Ring C. P. Bracken (Cassell 16s) H. P. Lovecraft was one of those rare writers who could play a consistently chilling tune on a single note. He was, I suppose, the American M. R. James, firmly convinced that for the 'true epicure in the terrible' no setting could . rival the crumbling farmhouses and silted sea-

,• ports of rural New England. Most of his stories —of which The Shadow Out of Time was the .• longest—were published in magazines like Weird Tales and Astounding Stories in the 'twenties and 'thirties. His executor, Mr August Derleth, has now brought together the entire corpus of his work with a number of com- pleted stories which Lovecraft had left in note form at his death.

Lovecraft's New England was rooted in colonial times before the coke and Californian twin-burger invasion. Wizened farmers thumb - through tattered copies of Increase Mather's sermons, witch hunting is still an unspoken possibility and the seaports boast tattooed sailors who have brought back Polynesian wives and the cults of the Pacific. Against this folk memory of inbred hamlets and archaic rites, Lovecraft opposes a series of helpless victims and puzzled professors from Miskatonic University manfully struggling to shut the door on the past. Lovecraft was no specialist in black terror, but he was a most capable expon- ent of the atmospheric frisson and his simple themes of primal forces constantly encroach- ing on the fringes of the mind were open to in- finite subtle variety. An incidental pleasure for those of a scholarly bent is a marvellous imaginary bibliography of forbidden books such as the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of Von Junzt, Ludvig Prinn's De Vermis Mysteriis and the deliciously arcane Necrononzicon of Abdul Alhazred. As none of these are likely to appear on the market, one might as well settle for the collected Lovecraft.

In spite of the eulogies from Alistair Mac-

Lean on the back cover of Ronald Kirkbride's The Short Night, I found this a disappointing tale. The setting is Finland with everyone leap- ing gleefully in and out of sauna baths, quaffing aquavit and strumming folk songs on pike-bone kanteles. Clean limbed Americans, pert air hostesses and laughing tow headed chil- dren vied unsuccessfully for my attention. The

ubiquitous representative of the CIA, a glaringly

distinctive albino, prods his compatriot into committing murder at every opportunity and the long awaited villain, a low grade spy who has chosen Finland for its lack of extradition treaties, successfully escapes over the frontier 'to join the boilermakers.' My sympathies went with him.

Homelier stuff but none the worse for that is Roderic Jeffries's A Traitor's Crime. A hard drugs ring appears in the small town of Flec- ton Cross and the chief constable, whose son had taken off on a fatal maiden flight from his

college window under the influence of LSD, is

determined to stamp it out; suspicion falls on a surly detective and former tearaway who is coincidentally dating the chief constable's daughter. Mr Jeffries has caught the querulous small-town atmosphere perfectly, complete with

tearful scenes in the suburban lounge and irritation in the duty room against the outside investigating officer.

Jesuits are hardly the staple characters of thriller writers but Father Benedict Lomax, Si,

a weary priest and top agent of the nicely named Columba group (an organisation for transporting defectors across the curtain), is highly convincing. Peter Kinsley's Pimpernel 60 is a familiar tale of the supposed defection of a top Russian scientist from Albania, but there are wheels within wheels and the aim of the enterprise is to • discredit the Chinese in Albania. Father Lomax's relationship with the disgruntled Special Branch bodyguard and the nubile French woman used to lure the defector is neatly handled, without too much emphasis on their lapsed catholicism, and the action is fast and unpredictable.

Pick of the crop is Alec Haigh's highly adroit Sign on for Tokyo. The hero is a roving troubleshooter for a vast business cor- poration called Instecon confronted with a nasty case of commercial espionage and in- cidental murder in the steel industry. The technicalities of tapping coke ovens and blow- ing phosphorus-free steel are unusually en- grossing, given the added knowledge that any- thing that can possibly go wrong is bound to do so. The action ranges backwards and for- wards from Wales to Tokyo and never slackens its pace. The pseudonymous author, we are told, is a kind of scientific polymath bearing a card which admits him day or night into the White House. This must make him either the

janitor or a luminary from the remoter echelons of the CIA. In either case, we can hope to see more books from his pen.

Tokyo seems to exert an irresistible fascina- tion over novelists at the moment. Michael Underwood's The Man Who Killed Too Soon begins in Japan with a solicitor on holiday and returns to Tokyo for a particularly twisty denouement. Victim of the plot is a criminal of great charm who has absconded with a large amount of his even more criminal employer's loot. On his return to England our criminal is skilfully framed for the murder of his boss's wife. Good court-room scenes and some pleasant vignettes of the higher reaches of crime make this a fairly irresistible read.

An ambitious theme in C. P. Bracken's Roman Ring gets rapidly bogged down among endless minor characters and confusingly frag- mented action. Briefly, the plot hinges round a genial gang of rare book thieves in Italy who are pressurised by a somewhat tougher gang from America to take more risks for higher returns. The hard-headed heroine, who has been sent to Italy to appraise a library, is roped in as a double agent by a rather apathetic young man in the employ of a noted but unspecified London auctioneers, evidently annoyed at poaching on their preserves. Characterisation is good, and the plot unusual, but too much like hard work for a hot summer day.