The Mideast Menace

What the world needs is a suspense novel in which a guileless Arab touring New York stumbles across a gang of Macadamia nut smugglers and is pursued across the wastes of Scarsdale by admen armed with barbecue spits, while sullen peasants riding power mowers close in menacingly. In the meantime, thriller writers still prefer the Mideast or Southern Europe for their setting. Two of the better new blood-and-Baedekers:

DECISION AT DELPHI, by Helen MacInnes (434 pp.; Harcourt, Brace; $4.95), is a reasonably diverting romance that is not as taut as it should be because its tale of dark doings in Greece and Sicily is interleaved with too much travel gush. The author's proposition is that a band of left-of-Moscow terrorists in present-day Greece plans to set the Balkans afire by assassinating Marshal Tito. The wandering innocent who runs afoul of and eventually vanquishes these unpleasant plotters is an American architect named Strang. His wily adversary is a monster of plumbless evil who calls himself Odysseus--and the author does not fail to borrow a plot twist from Homer. The counter and under-the-counter intelligence agents of several countries haven't a clue about who Odysseus really is. Storyteller Maclnnes casts some forthright foreshadows, but it takes Strang and the reader most of the book to uncover the blackguard, just in time to save the President of Yugoslavia and a beautiful girl photographer. Only one thing bothers the reader. Early in the book, the author represents her virile hero as musing in these words about whether to attend a formal dinner: "Who am I to lower the tone of an haut monde evening with my simple little tweed?" Does Tito really need such help?

THE DOOMED OASIS, by Hammond Innes (314 pp.; Knopf; $3.95), is a stouthearted attempt to win back the desert from the venery-in-Araby school--Paul Bowles and Frederic Prokosch--and return it to the unperfumed condition described by that old camel trammeler, Foreign Legion Novelist Percival Christopher (Beau Geste) Wren. The Legion defends no forts in this tale, but there is an outfit called the Trucial Oman Scouts and there is, as a matter of fact, a defended fort. There is also some rousing prose, not all of it defensible. The book opens with: "Call Aubrey George Grant! The moment had come. My mouth felt suddenly dry. The Court was waiting and I knew the ordeal ahead of me was a long one. In telling the whole truth I might convict an innocent man . . ." The narrator testifies, dry mouth and all, for more than 300 pages about an oily Emir who wants more oil, and a berobed old Britisher with a patch over one eye and a theory that, by Allah, there is petroleum under a certain unpromising patch of ground. The old fellow's bastard son shows up, learns to be an oil geologist in a trice, and shortly is locked in mortal combat with his father. It is this son who defends the fort, and he would be there yet, pinging away with his Enfield at the emir's thugs, if the Trucial Oman Scouts had not fetched him out. They are a dandy plot device, and Novelists Prokosch and Bowles might do well to borrow them from Innes.

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