Return to the Cold
ALAN, RAY
Return to the Cold_ Saberlegs By Eric Pace World. 249 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Ray Alan Author, "My Bonny Lies Under the Sea," "Spanish Quest" AN ARAB security officer once complained to me,...
...Len Deighton pushed one of his—a rather likeable man—under a bus, but was so ashamed of the deed that he will admit it only in private: His readers were left to guess what had happened...
...In my modest way, I once drowned an attractive blonde, only to receive a protest from an anguished Scots reader who was appalled by "the waste...
...The agent who resigns becomes an unperson, worse off than an ex-convict...
...In a moment of weakness, Ian Fleming let James Bond marry one of his girls...
...What can you write on a job resume...
...And what about the heroine...
...I hope my sensitive Scotsman does not chance to read Saberlegs...
...The hero, Charles Randall, quit the cia because of "too many moral twinges over the years, too many misunderstood refugees, too many child casualties in Vietnam...
...But those American foundations...
...I have substituted what I trust are fictitious names for the ones he mentioned...
...Although it seems too easy at first, momentum and tension are efficiently built up...
...He joins the Forrester Foundation, which, fortunately, is on the side of the angels, give or take an odd murder...
...How do you explain the years that have passed...
...How do you keep tabs on 22,000 separate foundations...
...The search takes him to Berlin, Aswan, Cairo, Suez, Beirut and the Jordan Valley...
...Like every secret agent who has ever felt such pangs, he finds that intelligence operations are easier to enter than to leave...
...Eventually, Randall goes back to covert work, but this time for private enterprise...
...The intelligence potential of a well-endowed American foundation has provided Eric Pace, a New York Times correspondent, with one of the themes for his well-written topical thriller, Saberlegs...
...If there is a Save-the-Infants Fund or a Stickleback Foundation anywhere, I hope it will accept my apologies...
...He may have given his youth and health to his country, but when he returns to its cold bosom he isn't even entitled to Social Security benefits...
...Its specialty is hunting Nazis, and it wants Randall to track down a sadistic German scientist who is selling nerve gas to an Arab terrorist group...
...What do you do with the villain...
...Ending a book of this kind can be a problem...
...The last third of the book is very good, first-rate reporting as well as storytelling, for Pace knows the Near East and has made its people and politics an integral part of his novel...
...And there is the problem of finding work...
...The Russians possess only a limited number of front organizations and they're relatively easy to keep track of...
...If you admit to your old profession, how to allay suspicions that you left it because of incompetence or disloyalty...
...So are the British outfits, things like the Save-the-In-fants Fund and the Anglo-Mideast Association...
...If you hope to use the hero again in another book, you can't encumber him with a wife...
...he pulled himself together with exemplary rapidity, however, and had her shot...
...I'm beginning to think the cia is just a decoy, and that the real nerve-center of American intelligence is probably the Homer Q. Stickleback Foundation for the study of teenage morality...
...Eric Pace resolves these problems brilliantly—but fiendishly...
...Reviewed by Ray Alan Author, "My Bonny Lies Under the Sea," "Spanish Quest" AN ARAB security officer once complained to me, "The Americans have an unfair advantage in espionage...
Vol. 54 • May 1971 • No. 11
