Return to the Balkans

JUDGMENT ON DELTCHEV [247 pp)

Eric Ambler--Knopf ($3).

Eric Ambler can make more fictional sense out of Balkan intrigue than anybody now writing. In the late '305, when he last tried, he produced four of the neatest suspense stories of the decade: Background to Danger, Cause for Alarm, A Coffin for Dimitrios, Journey into Fear. What with the war (he wound up a lieutenant colonel), and scripting and producing postwar movies for J. Arthur Rank, Englishman Ambler has been pretty busy since those days. But he has managed to write another Balkan thriller, a fact for which Ambler fans can duly rejoice.

Naturally, Ambler's villains aren't getting their orders from Berlin this time. With his usual sound grasp of regional realities, he wraps his story around the "treason" trial of a liberal politician. Why have the Reds gone after Yordan Delt-chev in the first place? And why have they thrown such fantastic charges at him? Ambler thrusts his British journalist hero, Foster, into the thick of things to ask those questions, then leads him a chase to the answers. Foster trips over a corpse almost as soon as he begins to poke around.

One of the more puzzling characters is a ubiquitous fellow named Pashik. Mousy little Pashik carries a black dispatch case in which he keeps stale meat sandwiches and a revolver. He keeps urging Foster to stay out of trouble. For some reason Foster trusts him and, as it turns out, Foster knows his man. Pashik proves to be a sturdy and reliable lover of freedom after all--and perhaps a symbol of something Author Ambler thinks the totalitarians can never entirely suppress, no matter how hard they try.

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