Of Killers and Thrillers
LEKACHMAN, ROBERT
Of Killers and Thrillers_ At Buttons By Garry Wills Andrews and McMeel. 174 pp. $8.95. SS-GB By Len Deighton Knopf. 344 pp. $9.95. The Matarese Circle By Robert Ludlum Richard Marek. 601...
...I shall look forward to reading him again in these honorable roles...
...Just for good measure, the more cultivated sleuths throw in miscellaneous instruction...
...A novelist who vilifies global corporations can't be all bad...
...double agents imbedded in the British intelligence establishment...
...That celebrant of civilized values and sensitive prose, Clifton Fadiman, a club judge of great seniority, supplies an advertising blurb...
...The author also belabors the vicissitudes of a young woman perpetrating a sociological dissertation on prostitutes and their pimps...
...Ambiguity is much in fashion...
...and, in the end, baffled villains and triumphant heroes...
...Garry Wills is a good intellectual journalist and an interesting historian...
...Ellery Queen, Lord Peter Whimsey, Emma Lathen's unflappable banker John Putnam Thatcher, and Michael Gilbert's para-insomniac Henry Bohun variously discourse on Egyptology, advertising, campanology, vintage wines, high finance, and the finances of English legal practice...
...Like a graduate of the Famous Writers School, he fills his pages with simple, declarative sentences compounded of cliches...
...12.50...
...Indeed, I encourage him to resume them with all deliberate speed...
...These days Graham Greene enjoys exposing the American imperialism Helen Mclnnes celebrates...
...No harm done...
...Politics are one thing...
...Detective yarns attract game players, hero worshippers, and nostalgic yearners after a vanished universe of stable values where villains are caught and punished by the relentless human instruments of abstract justice...
...When the economies of the West are thrown into fresh disorder by the triumph of an Ayatollah Khomeini few Westerners had heard of a year ago, almost anything becomes plausible...
...Bridges and murders are others...
...Count on it, a hero of superhuman cunning, stamina and imperviousness to bullets, drugs, and knives will turn the trick...
...It was all there: wicked Communists...
...SS-CB, Deighton's best performance since that early triumph, takes the risk of redoing history...
...601 pp...
...To a cultural snob, such as myself, something exceptionally depressing is addressed by the fact that the Book-of-the-Month Club has adopted The Matarese Circle as a main selection...
...The German Army and the SS quarrelsomely preside over occupied Britain...
...Since the flow of blood and the crunch of limbs quicken in the remaining five-sixths of this lumpy volume, it is conservative to estimate a grand total of at least 36 homicides, and similar amplifications of other categories of nauseating events...
...I should note that popular taste is catholic...
...sex in the mod manner...
...After teasing and titillating the gullible (who is not...
...Although Wouk,MichenerandHailey, three unchallengeably mediocre performers, filled the three top spots, the first 10 also harbored such novelists of merit as Joseph Heller, Bernard Mala-mud and John Cheever...
...The April Fool's Day New York Times Book Review placed Ludlum fifth on its Best Sellers' list...
...the thriller writer needs only to rescue the universe in the very nick of time...
...By contrast, thrillers deal in the sensational stuff of politics, revolution, espionage, loyalty and betrayal, plot and counterplot, fantasy and nightmare...
...True, in pursuit of this accountant's dream, the evil Guid-erone (yes, there are Mafia trimmings...
...crosses, single, double and multiple...
...In the first 100 pages, I tallied six murders, a pornographic episode, three instances of mayhem, and two of sadism...
...Len Deighton is a professional...
...Stacks of his latest effort greet browsers in the bookstores...
...a flip, irreverent hero clued-in to the contemporary scene...
...Here before usarethree recent examples of the contemporary thriller...
...Garry Wills' At Buttons falls furthest short of its considerable pretensions...
...There's no other way...
...A public that accepts the nomination may be growing in sophistication...
...Just before he is rubbed out, this cousin of Ian Fleming's Blo-feld states his vision: "The new world will be committed to the marketplace, to the developing of resources and technology that insure the productive survival of mankind...
...As usual, Ludlum is highon thebest-seller charts...
...I breathlessly wait for the new conspiracies and new horrors that the facts of life will compel the writers of fiction to invent...
...Virtuosos of the genre write decent English, feature attractive leading characters, kill off an unsympathetic victim or two painlessly, and entertain without pretension to enduring literary merit...
...Possibly all is not yet lost...
...Soon he is entangled in the machinations of the British resistance movement and the murderous rivalries among the Germans...
...Out of reviewer's hangup, I grimly read each one...
...But, oh, what a noble omelet will be cooked from just a few hundred or few thousand broken eggs...
...Current events conspire to encourage the wilder reaches of imagination...
...Although the plot falters and intention flags before the book ends, and Deighton's prose is undistinguished (his dialogue is particularly clumsy), SS-GB ranks high among political thrillers...
...England has lost the War, the King is in the Tower and Churchill is in prison, soon to be executed...
...Ludlum supplies no redeeming literary values to balance the vulgar sensationalism that would animate the chronicle, if anything could...
...Eric Ambler's renowned pre-World War II thrillers, A Coffin for Dimitrios, Journey into Fear and Background to Danger, live in memory as fine Left-wing, Popular Front stories about wicked fascists and intrepid agents of the Soviet Union...
...My guess about the popularity of the genre practiced by Ludlum, Morris West and others is that it appeals effectively to the apprehensions of people who suspect that the causes of public events are concealed and, behind the scenes, shadowy and sinister figures make all the importantdecisions...
...His first smash hit, The Ipcress File, served as a model for numerous imitators...
...Names that trip on the tongues of devotees include (of course) Sherlock Holmes and his echo Nero Wolfe, as well as Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, Ross Mac-Donald's Lew Archer, Simenon's Maigret, Freeling's Van der Valk, and Jan van de Wetering's trio of Dutch detectives...
...The action, such as it is, revolves around a secret society of Addison scholars...
...Slaughter, mayhem, rape, and everyday sadism are casual events...
...Reading those words, my spirits sank and failed to rise again for 174 pages...
...Truth to tell, denouements are invariably anticli-mactic because villains never live up to their billing...
...subverts numerous politicians, generals and officials, and physically liquidates people too dense to comprehend the new order...
...Wills describes his effort as a "Steven-sonian romance, and a lark...
...The most they advocate at Harvard is a bit of strategic misrepresentation...
...Deighton's narrative is dreadfully credible in its perceptions of how various Britons and Germans might in the circumstances behave...
...One finishes it with the satisfactory sense of having wasted several hours pleasantly...
...Trash comes in many varieties...
...For Archer, however, politics and detection swiftly merge...
...Although John LeCarre firmly locates himself in the camp of the Free World, his hero George Smiley is nearly as much afflicted by the pettiness, jealousy, venality, and treachery of his own associates as by the KGB...
...Their club, At Buttons, is named in honor of their hero's favorite London coffee house...
...Murky conspiracies, literary vendettas, unbelievable chases and homicides, and excruciatingly tiresome intellectual conversation, clog the pages...
...Much of the plot focuses on life in the New York Public Library...
...Joseph Conrad in The Secret Agent, G. K. Chesterton in The Man Who Was Thursday and Graham Greene in his numerous "entertainments" have made use of thrillers to explore moral conflict, interpret international politics and illuminate the ironies of our conduct...
...Reviewed by Robert Lekachman Thrillers ought not to be confused with tales of detection in which puzzles are set, murderers escape from rooms that remain securely locked, misleading alibis and deceptive clues abound, bumbling cops are baffled, and gifted amateurs, private eyes, or idiosyncratic regular members of the force, not only triumphantly solve the problem but, as the local cops say, apprehend the perpetrator...
...He simply wants to get on with the job, much as the boob-ish colonel in The Bridge Over the River Kwai sought to impress the Japanese by finishing their bridge in jig time...
...Would they disagree at the Harvard Business School...
...The Matarese Circle, the eighth of Ludlum's popular novels, is 601 leaden pages long...
...Rain falls in "continuous sheets," enemies are cornered in their "dens," heroines flaunt "innate taste," evil (but salvageable) types include the " filthiest killer in the Soviet," tactics are "desperate," thuds are "sudden," "loud" or, most powerfully, both, orders are "direct" and frequently "backed up by the highest authorities in England" or elsewhere, and so endlessly on...
...Not unlike Henry Kissinger, the true-blue mystery fanatic admires lonely cowboys and their moral equivalents among equally fictional detectives who stand up unafraid against hostile human and natural forces...
...The year is 1941...
...The protagonist, Douglas Archer, a senior Scotland Yard detective, operates under unavoidable German supervision but consoles himself with the thought that crime is crime and murder, murder...
...In The Matarese Circle the very embodiment of evil is an aged monster with a dream of world government of, by and for multinational corporations...
Vol. 62 • April 1979 • No. 9
