Easy Rider

THE MAGICIAN AND OTHER STORIES (271 pp.)--Bruno Frank--Viking ($2.50).

"Writers," says Bruno Frank in one of the ten short stories that compose this collection, "know one another as a banker in Amsterdam knows about one in Milan." The American public knew Germany's Bruno Frank (who died in Hollywood in 1945) principally through novels like The Persians Are Coming, but Frank's fellow writers in Europe knew his many plays and novels as well as they knew Stefan Zweig's and Lion Feuchtwanger's.

Like those writers, Frank was no experimentalist. He was simply, says Somerset Maugham--who rides his favorite hobbyhorse in an introduction to this volume --an "honest"' storyteller: one who knows how to "devise a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end which satisfies his creative faculty. ... He had a tender and compassionate heart ... a healthy sensuality, and liked women to be young, pretty and buxom."

All these characteristics are present in The Magician. The title story is about a world-famed theatrical producer who does not realize how thin his life has become until he stumbles on two of his servants making love and lustily gorging their bellies on the leftovers from one of his dinner parties. The Suitcase is about a traveling salesman who finds himself in a hotel room with an unknown woman's overnight case --which he unpacks, and loses himself in a wistful fantasy of romantic love. The Moon Watch is about a simple Moroccan Negro, who, when transplanted to Vienna as a valet by a well-meaning professor of Arabic, naturally assumes that his master is the magic that makes the city hum. Sixteen Thousand Francs is about a German who steals money off a dead French officer in World War I. Fifteen years later, hunted by Hitler and still haunted by his crime, he flees to France to refund the money--only to find that the sole heir is a hard-boiled French Nazi.

What readers are most likely to see in all these stories are qualities that make for engaging reading rather than great writing: a sure professional touch, quiet sophistication, an easy way with the ways of the world--the qualities of a Continental Somerset Maugham.

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